On doing it – with the right tools

Anyone want to know how much I love this photo? Anyone? Seriously, ask and I’ll tell you. I love it with the white hot passion of a star gone super nova. I love it, because it’s a picture of rocks. It’s a picture of rocks about sex and God, with a dash of good humor and a pinch of humility.

I love it because the man who made it is a man who loves more than anything to work with his hands. You can feel it when you pick up one of these rocks, the surface so smooth it’s as if nothing is there. And yet, the messages are at once salient, and impossible — it’s a burning bush argument: am I really getting fortune cookie karma from a river stone? Yep. From a guy who has a singular focus on what he’s doing, and has just the right tools to get the job done.

So, this is a post about tools. I have a lot of them, the digital kind, and I’m often asked what I recommend and could I teach them, and should client x buy Illustrator or Photoshop or InDesign or Final Cut Pro so they can make quick edits on files and on and on. And I’ve worked up a bit of my own burnished stone wisdom that may help someone other there in the Interworld. Here goes.

1. If you think you need a piece of software, you don’t. Because if you think you need it, then you don’t know how to use it, you’ll be shocked at the price, and pissed at yourself for not being smart enough to know what it is in the first place.
2. Text is the most versatile format ever, ever, ever. If what you do is write things, do yourself a favor and get rid of all the shortcuts to Microsoft Word. Replace them with shortcuts to TextEdit and Notepad. Write there. These are the pencil and paper of computerized writing and will make whatever you write more portable to design, email, web, production, whatever. Make all the partners in your workflow happy and ditch the other cruft.
3. The most important skill you can learn that will improve your communication online and in person, is how to lay a few words on top of a photo. Exception to previous point, PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google apps are clever — and now even a bit sophisticated — graphics applications. You don’t need PhotoShop to build a graphic for a website or poster — just head over to iStockphoto.com, find a clever kitten hanging from a branch, write “Hang in There!” with a little drop shadow, and export to a jpg. That’s all. From there, the world is your oyster. I have a client that does 90% of the graphics work for here organization’s website in PowerPoint, I kid you not. It makes me throw up in the back of my mouth a bit, but it’s true.

Bottom line, simplicity should always trump ego. Software is a drug that feeds that ego, people. Don’t let it eat you up. If you put a few braincells to thinking about alternative methods to doing what you need to do, you’ll find more often than not you already have the tools you need to get the job done, and get back to work.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 12:38 am. It is filed under Blog, Features and tagged with Personal Tech, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.