New technologies are not only pushing design outcomes, they are better informing the design process. Advances in staple applications like InDesign, Photoshop and Flash, and emerging 3D rendering platforms, are shaping the way see design as the ever bloating array of search engines and browsing technologies are fashioning the way research is performed. These technologies can make your life as complicated as you let them make it. They also have the power to make it so much simpler.
Design software itself to one side, the emerging technologies can help in two areas: 1. To help you better use the software. 2. To enable ready access to resources and research materials. The beauty lies in the ability to draw either of these benefits with ease.
Frustration with software will always lie close by – the path of software knowledge and the path of what you want to do don't always run side by side. When the boy / girl beside you doesn't know the answer, Google surely will. Having answered the problem, you've probably also found the best place to visit when the next obstacle presents itself. And so the rolling stone of knowledge development gathers pace and size. The aim of the game here being to start to limit the obstacles that are likely
to present themselves.
Sites and blogs that have a bit of a following usually have some way to keep their fan-base informed. Email, RSS, Twitter, Facebook and variations of the above are all avenues that some of these sites and blogs utilise to pass the lastest ideas to the masses. Running a cursory eye over the updates will either give you something you can use at the instant, or at the very least, a touch point of understanding on which you can build your skills. Down pop the obstacles. Slavisly reading over blogs and feed updates aren't however, likely to build strong ideas behind your design.
Keeping abreast of information that is relevant to design – or relevant to anything else for that matter – gives the idea generating portion of your brain something to chew on. This is where the really nice parts of new applications come to the fore ... this is where life becomes a lot simpler. So its not all about gorging yourself on information and consuming your life with the prattle of social media.
A few simple tools can make finding the information you're after, or just keeping an eye on the things you enjoy, really easy. The aim is to have people designing, rather than trolling through information to find a pearl that will ignite the imagination. The aim is to boost your enjoyment of what the internet has to offer because it's easier, not just because there is more information.
As a start, you don't have to look too far past Google and your web browser for help. We mentioned Google before in a searching sense but their applications are becoming increasingly handy. Gmail itself is a great tool to consolidate your various email accounts, sync your calender from various sources, collate documents from colleagues and fetch your latest RSS feeds. This puts a lot of what you would use and look at
on a day-to-day basis in one place. Easy.
One organisation (and their various contributors) that effortlessly captures the needs of the browsing public and develops an application to meet the need is Mozilla. Their browser, Firefox, really speeds up the search for, and enjoyment of, good information. Tabbed searching is great on its own but add in offline browsing through applications like Scrapbook, opening multiple tabs quickly with Snaplink or saving mulitiple images at once with Screengrab are really great technologies.
"It would be really nice if ..." seems to be a dying phrase in the world where design intersects with technology. The geeks out there are answering many of the technological questions we ask when things aren't easy or lacking functionality. Take a quick look around and you will find that problems aren't too hard to solve, and that getting the information that you need, the information that you enjoy, doesn't require blisters from the bench.
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