5 Easy Ways to Customize Your Workspace and Workflow

5) Customize Your Stacks for Easier Readability

A great feature for Leopard is Stacks. It allows you to add regularly-used folders to your dock which will fly out to reveal contents when selected. Unfortunately, they aren’t always easy to visually identify. An easy way to customize your Stacks is adding drawer overlay icons. The icon design at Optica Optima has created some awesome overlays to use with your Stacks folders.

To add the icons to your Stacks, download the set and move the appropriate icon into the folder you’re placing in your Dock. When you drag that folder into the Stacks area of your Dock, a handsome icon overlay will appear on top providing quick visual identification.

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Accepting Rejected Concepts

Unfortunately there are going to be many instances in your design career where a concept you’ve created isn’t met with the excitement and appreciation you would have liked. Whether you’ve missed the mark, or your client is reluctant to expand their own vision, or the project brief was misunderstood, it happens. You can’t take it personally since it’s the nature of the job.

But sometimes a concept gets rejected that you had really got invested in and it breaks your heart to think you’ll never get to use the idea. That’s where the Reject Folder comes in handy. I keep a folder present on my hard drive for those creative solutions I’ve come up with but were never fully realized. It acts like a source of inspiration for tricky jobs I encounter later on. Maybe that grid structure from a rejected concept would work beautifully for a new job coming in, or what about the way I aged the photos that one time? That looked like it had a lot of potential. Could that be re-interpreted to fit a new job?

It’s important not to get discouraged if a concept gets rejected and it’s also important to have a sense of humor about it. I created a custom folder for those rejected gems and proudly show it off on my desktop. Why not, right?

You can create your own Leopard-style folder icons by downloading the handy little application ICONIC. This simple program allows you to organize your desktop with custom folders in just a few clicks. Give it a try!

Quick Tip: Creating a Custom Website Icon for iPhone

I’m the type of person who relies heavily on RSS feeds. In fact, I have a bit of an addiction to them. As a result, I rarely go directly to webpages anymore and I would wager a bet that a growing number of the online population isn’t either. That being said, if someone wanted to add a link to my site directly from their phone (thanks if you do!) then I want to be certain the icon they get is a pretty one and not one that will ugly up the place!

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Quick Tip: Figuring out Keyboard Shortcuts for Wingdings

This trick falls under the “When will I ever need to know that?” category, but since I ran into this problem today at work, I figure this entry could help somebody.

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