Excellent article on Colour Theory for Web Design and Branding.
I came across this remarkably concise and awesome article on colour theory and its application in websites and design. It serves as a great resource for anyone embarking on creating or rejuvenating a brand who wants to be clever about it.
CLICK HERE
Telephone: Completely free incoming telephone number via the internet.
Mention VOIP and many people think....complication, complication, complication.
Well it needn't be so.
Sipgate.co.uk provide a completely free service for incoming calls. Their plans and tariffs for outgoing and international calls are pretty amazing too. Best of all, there is finally a simple application from the mac app store that makes setting it up a cinch.
There are lots of terribly ugly "Soft-Phones" like X-lite etc and to be perfectly honest I have never once managed to set one of them up without problems or needing a telecoms expert to change something or other.
"Telephone" by Alexei Kuznetsov is a whole different story,
It has a beautifully minimal interface and does not complicate things with features you will never need.
Once set up it integrates with your mac address book or you can just type a number in the box. Best feature of all, though, is that via sipgate.co.uk you can set up voicemail for free. When someone leaves you a message when your either busy or do not have Telephone running, the message is sent to you via email as a sound file, so you can keep the voicemail and use it in audio applications etc (i store mine in itunes).
So if your looking for a communications solution for your small business this setup works beautifully for me, so it should for you too.
Color Expert - Colour library in your pocket!
This one is a pretty contentious issue. Can one truly work with colour on an uncalibrated screen.
Well despite my initial misgivings, yes you can and quite succesfully. Its never going to be perfect but if your a designer, work with textiles or simply want to re-decorate your kitchen you cant really go wrong for £5.99. This web app works like a charm and despite being used on a typically saturated screen, the colour matching actually isnt that bad, and goes a long way to helping choose those oh so inmportant hues.
I love that you can email the swatched you create to yourself or others as it generates a lovely image of the colours to include in the mail as well as the colour details.
Extra Word Services for Mac....Tools for writers
Have you ever needed to re-order sentences in Word or Pages alphabetically or numerically? Ever typed a whole paragraph without realising you had caps lock on and want to change it all back to lowercase? Well its not possible to do either of these and many other wordy things without Devon Technologies wonderful WordService plugin (completely free).
Once installed it adds many new services into the Mac's global Services menu (that oft forgotten and lonely place on many a mac!).
Glyph Shortcuts (Mac of course) - How to type those funky symbols!
This website has a neat list of all the Mac glyophs (typeable symbols) and their shortcuts, so if you find you type some of them repeatedly, its worth printing off and learning the shortcuts!
Brilliant Free Texture Photographs - Urbandirty.com
This website provides tons of free textures for you to use royalty free on your websites, design projects etc! some really strangely beautiful images of urban decay.
Another not Mac blog! - print your own technical paper...
This website is very cool, it has lots of paper generators for graph paper, manuscript paper and paper you may have never heard of, whats great about it is that you can specify the size etc and it will generate a pdf for you to print! very handy indeed!
Moo.com - Not strictly Mac but too great to miss!
Moo cards, the biggest thing in contact cards since the victorian carte de visite!
Quite a community has built up around moo.com and their prices are very VERY competitive. For me the most amazing thing is that they let you have a different image on every card!
Please do check em out and post your moo cards on here for all to see!
b
QR-Code Generator...
This website is brilliant for generating QR-Codes, the next generation barcode. They can be used to convey short bursts of info, contact details, websites, allsorts!
Try putting one on your business card or website!
Mobile Phones (inc the iPhone) can read and translate them into data!
Enjoy!
PixelGirlPresents - Fantastic source of icons and wallpapers...
Pixelgirlpresents is one of those websites that hosts some strange and altogether wonderful digital artwork for your use as wallpaper for your mac or iphone.
Enjoy!