Thanks to Pat at Escape Route for letting me post this video review here. When we started on concepts and topics for video reviews for her site, there were a few that I felt could serve not only the crafting & scrapping set as well as designers. The first that came to mind was Think Ink from Neenah Paper.
This free app for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad (non-iPad native) is perfect for creating color palettes from any color you have in mind, or even pull a color from a photo or design in your photo gallery. This is a handy tool to have with you when looking for inspiration or working on a project.
There are many ways that a Web designer or developer can build a site, from hand coding the entire thing to using tried-and-true software like Adobe Dreamweaver (affiliate link) or other WYSIWYG/heavily-assisted programs. Over my career, I've used a little bit of everything, eventually settling into a hand-coded environment using skEdit. But a recent blog, specifically a line in a blog post made me take another look at these options and shortcuts.
Are shortcuts cheating?
A line Laura Otero had written in a recent post highlighting one of the latest darlings of the CMS world, SquareSpace, stirred up some questions I've wrestled with over the past few years. Is it "cheating" to use systems that take all or a good majority of the legwork out of Web development? I'll be honest, some of these shortcuts and snippets are very nice and I've saved myself quite a bit of time with some of them, but I still rely heavily on what I've learned through my years of hand-coding. That being said, if someone takes paths of ease to complete a project, are they less of a professional for doing so? What would their peers think?
I guess it's all in how you look at it, how much self-guilt and self-imposed peer pressure you put on yourself, that determines the answer. I still feel the answer may very. As long as the client is getting a great product and it meets/exceeds their goals, then who's to judge the path that was taken to get there? As long as the ideas are original, and the execution is sound, who can argue with that? What say you?
My earlier iPad sketchbook post got me thinking about what could be done to make my iPad sketching experience better than it already is. The answer, my friends, was hidden in a grid.
Here are two packs of grid “paper” background images (each with various grid colors and two grid sizes, 25px and 50px) that can be used on the iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch. Certain sketching apps (Adobe Ideas and Brushes (iTunes links) are two of them) will let you pull in photos from your iDevice’s photo library letting you draw on it or add the photo as a layer. Simply add the grid photo to your drawing and you can then add a layer above it and sketch out your idea. Works great for logo ideations, layouts, and anything else you can dream up.
Update: 12/28/2011
I’ve made available a premium set of gridded templates for those that wish to focus their designs on mobile apps and the mobile web.
My earlier 
