Textonic

For the past five years I’ve worked in the same digital space. 1024 by 768 screen resolution, Outlook and Thunderbird for email, and Internet Explorer and Firefox for browsing (with an occasional Opera fling). I’ve begun all design projects with a blank 800 by 1000 canvas, and quite frankly, it bores me. My creativity has been restricted and I’ve never been able to view the full scope of things.

Over the past few months I’ve been working hard to recreate my digital life, including my workspace and everything it involves. I’ve moved my blog, reinvented my online persona, and more importantly, switched to bigger and better things. I’ve finally decided to do freelance work full time and my career is finally starting to pick up speed. But before all of this I was in desperate need of a new life management system.

As you might recall, some months ago I experienced a number of computer and internet problems that left my career unstable. I had no working computer of my own, no money to purchase one, and when I did have the proper resources my internet access was spotty at best. Fast forward to the present. I have my own high performance PC running all the apps I could ever need, and I have a strong internet connection to boot.

With this new PC came more options and even more opportunities. With a new monitor at hand I decided to change my old ways and move up in the resolution charts, ditching the classic 1024 by 768 resolution for a more robust, detailed 1280 by 1024. And I’m sure once I upgrade monitors I’ll be once again ditching this for the dumbfounding 1600 by 1200. Adding to the screen upgrade I also took the time to upgrade each and every program installed and even made a few smart application purchases to help tidy up my workspace even more. Along with a few nifty, free, widgets, like GCal, for example, I invested a few dollars in StarDock’s ObjectDock, eliminating my need for the bulky Taskbar.

I also took this time to delete all of my email Apps and instead moved all of my email communication over to GMail, simply the best browser based email solution. I did the same with my RSS feeds and voila, a good percentage of my online communications are now available from one simple, customizable Google homepage. While moving all of my email and RSS feeds was an easy task the same couldn’t be said for my Instant Messaging. At the current time I have accounts with AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, IRC, and GTalk, though I only use a couple of them, but it’s still nice to have the others around just incase.

Meebo was my original choice to manage all of thee accounts, but after playing around with the wonderful service, and experiencing a few Firefox crashes I decided to once again give Trillian a try, and I fell in love with it all over again. Gaim was another choice, but it just didn’t satisfy my needs. Now if only there was a client in the style of Adium for Windows. One can only dream. The only downside to all this is Trillian has no support for any VoIP services like Skype, and so I was forced to download it as well.

Your Persona

While redesigning my digital workspace was a fairly easy, though time consuming, task, doing the same for my persona was pretty difficult. I had a hell of a time making the switch from my classic alias Zeerus to my actual name, and I’ve still yet to complete that transfer. And while I’ve switched most of my online pages over to display my real name Google’s yet to really pick up on it. Services like ClaimID are great in this sense, but otherwise a major waste of time.

Hosted Solutions

When you have no money for your own hosting, sites like WordPress.com and Blogger are great, but hosted solutions are so much better and allow you much more freedom. One major decision I made was the choice to switch to my own hosted solutions, a no-brainer. Thanks to Evan I now have a great deal using his servers to host my blog, forums, and whatever else I need a home for. I haven’t purchased a domain name yet, but that will all come in good time.

Offsite Services

They make my life a little easier, and the same can be said for the millions of other people that use services like Flickr and Carbonmade. While they don’t show the full range of your talent or creativity they make organizing your work extremely easy and present it all in an attractive fashion. Flickr is one of those great tools that you stumble upon every now and then and absolutely become addicted to.

Carbonmade, on the other hand, is a tool for designers, by designers. It makes portfolios a snap to manage, and it’s all free. Of course, both sites, along with many others, offer premium plans, but for the most part, as a freelancer, they’re not really necessary. There are a million and one web apps like these, so it’s important to settle on the right ones. I personally have settled with Carbonmade for my portfolio, and Flickr as a sharing outlet for my photography and design, and I’ve actually managed to land a few clients thanks to it.

Though it really needs to mention, 37signals is a creative powerhouse specializing in business management applications, and almost every designer should invest in at least one of their products, whether it be Basecamp, Backpack, or maybe even Campfire.

The Base

While all of these services are great separately every designer needs their own base, a place that brings all of these services together, like a blog, or maybe even a simple portal page. I’ve settled with WordPress for my blog, and the virtually unlimited number of plug-ins available for most of these services makes displaying my work all in one place as easy as making a batch of oven ready cookies. All that’s required is a tiny bit of design tweaking and you’re all set.

Tying It All Together

When you put everything I’ve talked about into perspective it really doesn’t seem all that important, but when it comes to unleashing your full potential these tiny changes really help. You’ll find you’re more organized and you’ll have a lot less on your mind at the end of the day. Even the small things matter.

Now that I think of it, I’d really love to do an entire series on this, maybe a physical workspace design article, and another on service comparisons for sites like WordPress.com and Blogger, or Flickr and Zoomr. Let me know what you think.