e-tipi sounds like a weird name for a web-based service, and when you find out it stands for “Espresso Thinking Platform,” things don’t become much clearer. But once you find out what the app’s developers think “Espresso Thinking” is, then you start to get the idea:
“We believe that sharing an espresso in a nice café creates a particular atmosphere that frees minds and promotes promising ideas to expressly appear. This is what we call Espresso Thinking.”
It’s a nice thought, but is that really something that can be captured in a web-based environment? I recently talked about the same kind of collaboration (lack of coffee products notwithstanding) in an article about my beloved sketchbook, so I was eager to find out if I could recreate the experience digitally using e-tipi. Read the rest of this entry »
Dear Friends,
On behalf of web workers everywhere, I’d like to thank you for the wonderfully creative ideas you’ve come up with. But since it’s becoming such a crowded field, you need to do a better job telling us why we should spend the time to evaluate your product.
Let me give you some tips, illustrated with real examples from products that have recently come across my desk. I won’t name names, because I haven’t tried the applications in question.
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My Firefox is jam-packed with add-ons. I love them, I collect them, I use them.
I probably overindulge, in fact. Some people, however, are not using them to their full potential, or simply not using them at all. It makes sense if you just have a clean browser policy, but if you’re not aware of what’s available, then you could be missing out.
Mozilla’s new Fashion Your Firefox web application is designed to make add-ons more accessible, and easier to find and install.
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As a former designer who still dabbles in the odd piece of commercial or hobbyist work, I’m sometimes stuck at the inception of a project, trying to discover the initial creative sparks that ignite a design, for those fragments of inspiration that set out the path from a blank Photoshop document to a living design.
Nine years ago as an interactive designer in a multimedia agency, designers would post various items we liked -magazine clippings, flyers, business cards, websites – onto a physical noticeboard that we could glance up at for inspiration. Over time, this grew organically into a wonderful design resource for the studio.
These days, my equivalent is a folder on my MacBook desktop called ‘Design Bin’ – I screenshot or scan a design I think might be inspirational in future and dump it in my design bin. However simple, this resource is growing in volume but diminishing in context – and in a connected era – is strangely unsociable.
Enter Scrnshots, a web-based service that lets designers share their inspirations by posting screenshots of interesting designs to a Flickr-esque web site.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
