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In Our Toolbox
Why We Love: Google Web Fonts
If you’ve ever read our blog, newsletter, or even had a design conversation with someone at Alt Creative, you likely know how obsessed we are with fonts. Over the course of the past 5 or 6 years, we’ve been asked the question many times: Can we use another font for our website? Something other than Arial, Verdana, or Times New Roman? We LOVE fonts, but for main body text, we still always recommend going with the web safe fonts. However, thanks to some new technology in the world of web typography, designers and developers like us now have the option to insert some really great fonts into their web designs using embedded fonts for headers and image overlays. Our favorite solution is the Google Web Font Library.
Why We Love iStockphoto.com
We love iStockphoto.com, a website resource that provides royalty-free stock images, media and design elements. Stock photos are ready-made images that are licensable for use in your advertising or promotional materials to illustrate specific things, concepts or ideas.
3 Companies that Captured Buzz at SXSW
This year’s SXSW was a huge showcase for new technology. New apps, services, and platforms were in abundance to the point of being a bit overwhelming. During our attendance we took note of some new companies who are making a big splash.
Why We Love: Pinterest
By now, you’ve probably at least heard the name of this product or met a die hard user addicted to using it. At Alt Creative, we are hooked. Check out how we are using this new social network.
Why We Love Join.me
Join.me is a free tool from the creators of LogMeIn, a company that specializes in software for remotely controlling and interacting with your computer. Join.me is a simple way to share your screen with a client, friend, or coworker when you aren’t in the same location.
Why We Love: One Time Secret
OneTimeSecret.com is a wonderful tool that we recently discovered at Alt Creative. Have you ever needed to send a password or other personal data, but you don’t want to put it in an email? That’s the brilliance of OneTimeSecret.com. You just visit the site, type in your secret, and the site generates an encrypted URL. You can then send that URL via email or instant message. Once the secret has been viewed, it’s deleted.
Why We Love Fantastical
Fantastical is a Mac OSX based program that allows you to easily add items to your calendar in natural language input. Fantastical’s natural language engine is expressive and intelligent so you can write in your own style. Fantastical automatically recognizes the location of your event and can even invite people from your Address Book to the event.
Instead of the tedious filling out of various fields that is required with Outlook, iCal, Yahoo, and Gmail calendars. Fantastical allows us to simply type it all out. For example, if I type “Meeting with John Smith next Friday at the Coffee Bean on S. Lamar”, Fantastical interprets that sentence and adds the meeting to my iCal calendar on the correct date with the person’s name in the title and the venue in the location.
In addition, Fantastical adds an awesome search capability for past, present, and future events and automatic alarms.
Learn more about fantastical at: http://flexibits.com/fantastical
Why We Love Hootsuite
At Alt Creative, we handle social media for both clients and ourselves. It can be overwhelming. That’s why we love Hootsuite! Hootsuite is a web-based social media service that allows you to schedule and monitor all of your social networks from one dashboard.
Why We Love WordPress
At Alt Creative, we understand the need for an easy-to-use content management system. We’d struggled with CMS platforms for years – we’ve tried Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, and more. But WordPress is hands down our favorite. Here’s why…
Why We Love: Transmit
Transmit is an FTP program designed by a company specializing in Mac software. An FTP (or, File Transfer Protocol) program is used to upload and download files between a local computer and a web server. As you can imagine, a reliable FTP program is a must have for a web design company, but it is also useful for our tech-savvy clients who have file uploading tasks.
Why We Love Ooma
We love not paying a phone bill. But, as much as we wish email was the standard, we need phones! That is why we love Ooma (well, that and because we just love saying “Ooma”). Ooma manufactures a device called the Telo, which connects to your high-speed internet connection to allow you to make calls using your existing home phone. You’ve likely heard of this type of phone connection, called VOIP (voice-over-internet-protocol). Services like Vonage and Time Warner Digital Phone use this technology. So what’s makes Ooma so great? We’ll it’s practically free! Read more…
Why We Love Remember The Milk
Remember the Milk is an online to-do list manager. We started using it at Alt Creative as a way to manage our client maintenance requests. We got tired of letting the inbox be the to-do list because it is impossible for email to help you remember deadlines, keep notes, and update statuses. Read more…
Why We Love Suitcase Fusion
Suitcase Fusion is extremely powerful font manager for Mac & PC. It helps us manage our fonts, our clients fonts, find the right font for each project and even weed out any corrupt fonts. Suitcase Fusion has an impressive list of features, but we’d like to cover some of our favorites. Read more…
Why We Love Trillian
Trillian is a instant messaging application for Windows, Mac, and mobile devices. It helps us stay in touch with out clients, partners, staff, and potential customers. Trillian has an impressive 450+ features, but we’d like to cover some of our favorites.
Why We Love Box.net
While we specialize in web design and development, we do our fair share of graphic design projects as well. Graphic design is notorious for requiring the sending of large files. Box.net helps up distribute the large design files and proofs to our clients and our printing partners. Read more…
Why We Love Evernote
Here at Alt Creative, we are unusually obsessed with having a paperless office. It’s important to us for more than just environmental reasons. We figure that if everything is digital the it’s also more accessible, searchable, and shareable. Enter Evernote – our favorite tool for saving remember-worthy tidbits in the cloud. Read more…
Why We Love 1Password
You’ve probably heard this before, but the secret to online security is to never use the same password twice. If your new year’s resolution this year is to be more secure online by using different passwords for your accounts, then you need 1Password. Trust us, we know what it is like to keep track of hundreds of passwords. Read more…
Why We Love FollowUpThen.com
I am not a naturally organized person. Growing up, I was always losing toys or forgetting where I put my homework. I made A’s, but my teachers were quick to slap a big ‘F’ when it came time to grade the organization of our notebooks. To this day, I am still upset with whoever came up with that concept. Read more…
Why We Love Freshbooks “Painless Billing”
Freshbooks is an online invoicing SaaS (Software as a Service). Their tagline is “painless billing”, and they aren’t kidding around. They make invoicing so easy. Back in 2005 while starting ATX Multimedia (now Alt Creative), I started looking for a better way to invoice my clients. I didn’t have an accounting background so many of the invoicing options such as Quickbooks overwhelmed me. I just wanted an easy way to send and track invoices and let my clients choose their payment method. Freshbooks was the only invoicing system that I could find that would allow me to email a link to the invoice that could be paid online, so I was sold. Many companies have entered the space since and I have occasionally looked at their features to see if the grass is greener, but none of them have ever swayed me because Freshbooks has something unique – they actively build loyalty. Read more…
Why we love Google Voice
We admit it – this month’s topics are a little Google-heavy, but we have decided to make the “In Our Toolbox” section part of our monthly email and our blog to give you the 411 on some of our favorite productivity tools. Google Voice is high on our list. While we love to actually talk to our clients, checking voicemails can be challenging in the information age. Google Voice gives us options! Read more to learn about how you can use Google Voice in your business to make your day-to-day phone related tasks easier to tackle. Read more…
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Pinterest 101: Using Pinterest to Promote Your Brand
A few months ago, we told you how much we are loving the new social network, Pinterest. We still think it’s the coolest – so thi... Read More
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