Steve Jobs “put a dent in the universe”. Although I admit they make a great product, I’m not a huge Apple fan. I’ll agree they make a great product, but you won’t see me standing in line for 4 hours to get their newest product (I’m the guy that waits a few months for a price drop). Nonetheless I really appreciate the work of Steve Jobs, as he raised the bar on design, usability and enjoying what you do. I’m late, but nonetheless wanted to pull together a tribute together with the countless others that have already done so, and continue to.

Here’s a collection of a few quotes I stumbled across lately, I hope you will too:

“We’re here to put a dent in the universe.”

“I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”

“Bill Gates‘d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”
– The New York Times, Creating Jobs, 1997

“…A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
-BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998

“I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.”
-Apple Confidential 2.0

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”
-The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993

“I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back.”
-Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
-Stanford commencement speech, June 2005

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”
-NBC Nightly News, May 2006

Feedback is as always, welcome.

Reflections on a Mote of Dust
by Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

The Photoshop Etiquette Manifesto for Web Designers

The recently updated Photoshop Etiquette can be quite useful when wanting to improve the clarity of a PSD when transferred. This site provides you with rules that will show you examples and bonus points ranging from external as well as internal file organization to exporting and design practices.

Photoshop Secret Shortcuts

This old, yet still very useful article by Nick La provides an overview of secret (i.e. not documented) Photoshop shortcuts that the author has learned from years of experience.

Photoshoptimize: Optimize Photoshop Performance

To improve the performance of Photoshop, this list of best tips will help any designer to optimize Adobe Photoshop for Mac as well as PC; from reducing cache levels to disabling export clipboard in Photoshop, and much more.

The Ultimate Free Master PSD File

The download features one master .PSD file with folders, assets, grid folders and layer comps ready to be used. The master file is using the best practice featured in Dan Rose’s Photoshop Etiquette.

Pixel Proliferation: A Toolset For Managing Screen Resolutions

This tool will help you to manage screens resolutions more easily. The toolset contains a collection of PS5 marquee-tool presets for common screen resolutions, covering fixed-screen resolution sizes, ratios for less common resolutions and standard ratios. Also, a collection of layered CS5 PSDs provides common devices for computing and design presentations. Finally, there is a reference chart for resolutions and design landscape. Useful.

iMac

Macbook Pro

iPad

iPhone

Here are a few church and ministry-based websites I’ve found recently that in my opinion really stand out.

Sojourn Community Church

Bethlehem Baptist Church

City Church

College Park Church

The Resurgance

Church Relevance

Cornerstone Fellowship

Glad Tidings Church

Kingsfield Church

Life Church

Long Hollow Baptist Church

Mars Hill Church

Mission Hills Church

Time Square Church

Trinity Fellowship Church

Fellowship at Two Rivers

Google Places:

The quickest, cheapest and easiest way to make your business more easily accessible online (via Google) is to add your business to Google maps via “Google Places”. Think of Google Places as an online yellow page directory powered by Google maps. The beauty of Google Places is it places local businesses at the top of their search results (see highlighted area in example to right) whether or not the business has a strong web presence. It’s completely based on geography. This is especially beneficial to brick-and-mortar businesses with a store-front.

Another really cool feature that Google includes with you Google Places account is analytics showing how many “impressions” and how many clicks your getting to your listing. It even shows how many people click “get directions” to get to you.

Google Places is a free service, so don’t let anyone try to trick you into paying for it!

Youtube:

Not everyone knows this, but Google owns Youtube. That means that it uses Youtube to leverage Its own advertising efforts. This can be used to you advantage because Google puts a high priority on video in Its searches. Experiment by typing in a well known corporation or band in Google.com, and you’ll notice that videos tend to make 1st page searches. Just make sure to tag your video appropriately, give it an appropriate (and easily searchable) title and you may find it easier to get your video, otherwise Google won’t feature it.

“50.5% of US consumers watch video online and they’re spending 45% more time doing it than a year ago — that’s over four and a half hours of online video per month.”
-Google

“Currently video makes up 40% of all Internet traffic and will exceed 91% by 2014.”
-Cisco

Social Media:

Your businesses Facebook or Twitter account may be getting more traffic than your website, which may earn it a higher search ranking. Leverage this, and you may be surprised to find out that people are using your Facebook page more effectively over your website.

Make it a combined effort

Although implementing one of these solutions may not show immediately noticable results, implementing them all will. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, however this should help you get some kind of results. Feel free to get in touch via comment, phone or email if you need any help, or would like to talk about hiring me as a consultant.

Download

These are listed in no particular order…

3Degrees

AKQA

Ascentium

Blitz

Cahoona

Deaxon

Atelier Santaclara

Mckinney

Razorfish

X-Prime

“How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?”
– Seth Godin, Seth’s Blog

What’s that mean for the little guy though? It means It’s easier than ever to connect with your consumers/prospects. Correctly harnessed, we can connect with more of our customers, and instead of having to resort to “push” marketing (traditional force-feeding advertising) we start “pulling” customers towards us, because a sense of community around our businesses/products begins to appear.

It doesn’t have to be difficult to integrate a social media presence into your companies marketing efforts, however It does require dedication and seamless synchronization with the entirety of your business. All marketing materials (including social media) need to play well with your marketing and branding strategy.

Stay tuned, as over the next few weeks I’m going to go through how to use specific social networks like Facebook and Twitter to take advantage of this new phenomenon known as social media.