ARK Squared Productions

Okay, it may sound a bit extreme, but let me explain…Before I ventured into starting out as a small business owner with my husband life was simple. We were happily married, regular income, cute condo, fluffy little white dog and both had regular hours working 9-5 jobs – outside of 9-5 we didn’t work it […]

While thinking about what to write this week I was thinking about what sort of things have made my life easier as a designer, and the software that I use came to mind. I have been using Adobe products for over 15 years, and Macromedia as well before Adobe bought them, and the different they make for my final products designed for clients are huge. I don’t think that I could function as a designer without Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver. So when my version from a couple years ago started to get very dated I was not looking forward to having to pay the huge amount for an upgrade – but then Adobe introduced Creative Cloud.

A brilliant tool for collaboration that I have recently started to use more and more is Google Docs. First launched in August 2005 and expanded to include the Spreadsheet in June of 2006 Google Docs is a great way to share projects that you are working on. Recently in our office we have needed to have a few “living” documents, documents that we have needed to have multiple people in multiple locations working on the same parts…

I recently had a need to automate a few repetitive tasks on my PC, really out of sheer laziness. One of the pieces of software often needs the same task repeated over and over again. Each cycle of this task requires close to 30 keystrokes, and I needed to repeat this process 120 times. So faced with 3600 monotonous keystrokes I went looking for a way to simplify the process. I came across Jitbit Macro Recorder, a simple and clean tool for automation.

All business to business companies know that one thing you’re bound to spend some time on is learning about different companies so you can target them as a potential client. For example, if you’re a carpet cleaning company looking to make a connection with different carpet installation companies you might want to know some of the companies in your area and how to contact them. Generally that meant either spending a lot of time on the internet looking things up, make lots of phone calls, or pounding the pavement – but overall a large time investment. Well, Google has a great product that can do a lot of this work for you – FREE!