banter, musings, and excess of a high-ed designer
Originally posted for .eduguru Blogger Search Contest in November 2008.
Like most professions it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day projects, politics, and assignments inside Higher Education. However, sometimes especially during holiday breaks or slow fridays we do get some breathing room to catch up or sometimes step forward in our professional lives.
Now most you by merit are visiting this blog (or reading it on your favorite RSS reader) likely suffer from the same addiction as me bogged down with information overload from RSS feeds, Twitter, email and number of other sources that provide a swell of ideas, useful tricks, and inspiration. Now in order to leverage that bit of information you came across, rather then filing it away or sending it to bookmark oblivion. You need to TAG it, try using these handy addons from delicious, Remember the Milk, or your own Get Things Done process. The important part is that you classify the article/idea to help you later act on it.
Now in case you haven’t had your fill of sources, let me point out a few good feeds to add to your inspiration toolbox that vary on your role:
Graphic / UX Design
Marketing / Social Media
Professional Development
Web Design / Coding
Once you found a task from your varied sources you need to quickly tag it with the type of action or category (see catagories above for example). I prefer to cross tagging such as DIY (Do it Yourself) with Office Upgrades or Inspiration and Web Design to aide with some quick context when you revisit the task later.
Just like attending a conference, schedule the time for yourself to work on these individual projects - such as a slow Friday afternoon, a quiet holiday break. And in case your boss wonders what your up to - reassure them this is to develop your skill set just like conference or training seminar and doesn’t cost them a dime.
The key to making this work, is that you select projects that interest and challenge you, especially if you haven’t flexed those skills in a while or EVER!
For instance, take a tutorial on creating a movie poster in photoshop - can increase your understanding in typography, graphic layering, and help you ace that next marketing design or HTML email.
Or try that integrating your favorite social media service into your portfolio or blog - not only will it help professional site it will give you the skillset to deploy the same integration in your next project website.
Finally, take the time to write that guest blog you’ve been itching to do to highlight your latest projects and expand your ability as copywriter and educator.
All these actions benefit your value as a working professional and build on your existing strengths to both your employer and yourself - so I encourage each of you to make the time to pick a new and fun project for the holiday season and sink your teeth in.
Sound off below and share your tips for professional development, everyone has method to organize the maddness - what’s yours?
Finally dropping by Missouri State campus to kickoff HighEdWeb 2008, we were welcomed to some upgraded scwag, wifi necessities, and our introductory workshops for us lucky few who arrived early and could afford this unique sessions.
I was fortunate to catch Derek Tonn last year in Rochester and was floored by his presentation on “Graphics Optimization for the Web: Advanced Tools and Techniques”
Needless to say, this is not your mom’s “Save for Web” in photoshop 3 hour workshop; instead opting to delve into the nitty gritty and occasionally command line wage war on the file size of your images.
By the most impressive aspect, is the ability to take staple images in your design and reduce thier filesize by nearly 60-90% in most cases with these techniques - now why would you want to do this?
So let’s look at some of the helpful tools to get you there, mind you I reccomend using this for your graphic designers and web developers - I would not reccomend use of these applications to your content owners. I will be doing a followup post this week on useful tips and software geared toward the end user.
More to come later… now it’s time to dash. For complete details and tutorials, be sure and visit Derek’s site at
A higher education web evangelist focusing on UX, social media marketing and analytics. Only 26, I have found myself criss-crossing the country and private and public sectors providing my expertise in a myriad of topics and web-based technologies.