The Importance of Revision Control

Over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of people in various roles that haven’t understood the importance of version control when developing software; whether that is an enterprise application, a landing page, email blasts, or web-to-print. Keeping a repository of your digital assets is critical. When our group first started out about 10 years …

View full post

Pro Bono – The Real Value of Free Work

One of the biggest mistakes I see designer’s make who are starting out, is to lean too heavily on their academic portfolio. While it is nice to see the thought process students go through when completing their studies, that also tends to lead to a lot of the same thing (homework in a portfolio case). …

View full post

Defining Behavior: the Often Overlooked Detail of Requirements Gathering for VDP

Time after time the number one problem that I see from clients attempting to make the transition from traditional print, to variable data print (VDP) is that they don’t think about how they want a product to behave. They see one record’s worth of output in a sample, and assume because it looks good that …

View full post

Insurance Firm’s Missed Advertising Opportunity

For a long time now I’ve been seeing advertisements from most of the major insurance companies, claiming they can save you money by switching to them. The most popular call to action seems to be, “15 minutes could save you 15% or more”. Every time I see one of these ads I can’t help but …

View full post

Managing File Names in a List

Have you ever had to take a large number of files in a directory, and put them in a list? Copying each file name and pasting individually can be a pain, but there is a better way. Here’s a trick I learned a few years back while managing a database for a client. Copy the …

View full post
The Importance of Revision ControlPro Bono – The Real Value of Free WorkDefining Behavior: the Often Overlooked Detail of Requirements Gathering for VDPInsurance Firm’s Missed Advertising OpportunityManaging File Names in a List

Mar 09

The Importance of Revision Control

Categories:

Software Devleopment, Technology

by stevetruett

SubversionOver the years, I’ve worked with a lot of people in various roles that haven’t understood the importance of version control when developing software; whether that is an enterprise application, a landing page, email blasts, or web-to-print. Keeping a repository of your digital assets is critical.

When our group first started out about 10 years ago, we had no version / source control solution in place. If we wanted to create iterations of our files, we simply put a suffix or prefix on the name of it. There are several reasons why doing this can be dangerous.

First off, you run the risk of not having a disaster recovery plan in place.If your hard drive fails. You’ll be looking at either re-creating those digital assets from scratch, or paying costly lab fees to take your hard drive apart and retrieve the data manually. With a source control system (such as Subversion) you have the benefit of it being on a network with redundancies in place to protect you against such problems.

Using the renaming method to version your files has other downsides to it. If you want to share your files with others, you have to manually load them to an FTP site, email, public network share or some other such effort.  With a network based version control system, your whole development team has access to the same repository. Whenever someone makes a change and commits it, everyone in the group has immediate access to those changes. Additionally, you can enforce commenting at the point of commitment, so that your developers have to elaborate on what it was that they did to the file.

Perhaps most importantly though, version control allows you the ability to see the history of a file. If you want to see what other people have done in the past, it’s just a mouse click away. And if what that person did was a mistake, you can go back to the version before that change to undo it. This is where the power of version control really comes into play. It’s like an undo button for your entire workflow.

I can’t tell you how many times I have had clients come back to me, and ask if I have the digital assets from a project we’ve done for them in the past. (No, really I can’t tell you because of the non-disclosure agreements I’ve signed LOL). Because version control is part of our best practices, I know that I can always accommodate these types of requests. That is a value add which your customers will take notice of, trust me on that.

What boggles my mind is why other industries don’t take more advantage of this technology. Look at Subversion for instance, it is an open source solution that costs nothing to obtain. All you have to do is put the hardware in place to create redundancy in case of a disk failure, and you have one a world class way of protecting you (and your client’s) data.

 

Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments off

Mar 06

Pro Bono – The Real Value of Free Work

Categories:

Design, Technology

by stevetruett

One of the biggest mistakes I see designer’s make who are starting out, is to lean too heavily on their academic portfolio. While it is nice to see the thought process students go through when completing their studies, that also tends to lead to a lot of the same thing (homework in a portfolio case). When someone asks me for advice on how to get into this field, the first thing I tell them is to avoid for profit private colleges (*cough* University of Phoenix *cough*). The second bit of wisdom I offer is to pick up some pro bono work.

Donating your design skills to a non-profit or charity gives you two invaluable things you won’t get at a university. First, you will have a lot more creative latitude when you are working for free. The people that you donate your time to understand that you’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart, and they’ll be more likely to allow you to do what you want because of that. And because pro bono work isn’t as high pressure as commercial work, you’ll be able to take chances aesthetically which you wouldn’t take doing regular commercial design.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it gives you a living, breathing client. Someone who has a specific need, and the ability to voice whether or not you are meeting that need adequately. Sure, a professor will tell you what they think you are doing wrong from a technical perspective; but they can’t possibly begin to emulate all the experiences you’ll have dealing with real clients. Doing pro bono work will allow you to start building the soft skills that college can’t.

Also, potential employers love seeing that you donate time to worthy causes. You’ll get a nice piece to add to your body of work, along with a great story behind how it took shape.

If you’re considering donating your time to a charitable organization, one of the best places you can start is the United Way website.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments off

Mar 01

Defining Behavior: the Often Overlooked Detail of Requirements Gathering for VDP

Categories:

Design, Marketing, Technology, VDP, Web to Print

by stevetruett

Time after time the number one problem that I see from clients attempting to make the transition from traditional print, to variable data print (VDP) is that they don’t think about how they want a product to behave. They see one record’s worth of output in a sample, and assume because it looks good that all the other iterations of that document will come out just as nice. But there are a million things you can do in a static print workflow that just don’t translate well into web-to-print.

One great example of this is aspect ratio. When a client has a collection of logos that they want to use on a VDP piece that they are re-purposing from their legacy static print assets, they often fail to take into consideration that those logos were not designed to function well together in a dynamic layout. What can wind up happening is that once the developers start getting their hands dirty, they discover that because the aspect ratio of those logos varies so wildly, in order for them all to fit within a given space; some of those logos aren’t going to look the way the client has become accustomed to seeing them.  Things have to be scaled, and unless you scale them disproportionately  (which no-one likes to do) you wind up with some logos coming out looking fine (because they just happen to be roughly the same aspect ratio as the proof of concept ) and some that look ridiculously small (because the aspect ratio differs so much from “the norm”). I’ve found my team in the unenviable position of trying to make files like these work together in one dynamic layout, and then trying to explain to a client why things don’t look the way they expected.

There is a definite learning curve to this technology. Not only from a developer’s perspective, but also from a consumer’s. We as VDP professionals have a responsibility to help guide our clients through that decision making process. Defining the behavior of a product during the requirements gathering phase often means helping them understand what it is they want. If you’re not diligent in that step of the process, you can run into a dangerous trap of giving your client exactly what they asked for, but it’s not what they want.

Tags: , , , , ,

Comments off

Feb 28

Insurance Firm’s Missed Advertising Opportunity

Categories:

Marketing, Technology

by stevetruett

For a long time now I’ve been seeing advertisements from most of the major insurance companies, claiming they can save you money by switching to them. The most popular call to action seems to be, “15 minutes could save you 15% or more”. Every time I see one of these ads I can’t help but think, “No! You’re going about this all wrong”.

Here is what I mean by that. I work with marketing people, graphics folks, and web developers to create personalized 1-to-1 communications for some big clients. The flaw that I’ve always seen with these ads that say to give the insurance firm a call, is that it puts all of the burden on the consumer. You’re asking people to make the first step and pick up a phone, that to be frank they probably don’t have the time nor inclination to do. All of that to take a chance, that maybe they could save some money.

Here’s the solution. Instead of telling me, how much I might be able to save. Tell me what I will save. All of the data that these companies need to throw together a quote for a policy is already out there. I see other companies leveraging this type of data mining all the time. Here’s an example. Recently I just purchased a car, and I’ve been getting ads trying to sell me extended warranties for my make and model on a daily basis. But I’ve not seen one postcard, or email about insuring that vehicle. If I got a communication saying that company X would insure my car for a specific dollar amount, and that figure was lower than what I was paying. I would be on the phone with them in a heartbeat. This is a missed opportunity that insurance companies have been failing to leverage for a long time. Eventually we’ll see a savvy marketing firm do this for an insurer; to be frank I am just surprised I haven’t seen it yet.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments off

Jun 22

Managing File Names in a List

Categories:

Technology

by stevetruett

Have you ever had to take a large number of files in a directory, and put them in a list? Copying each file name and pasting individually can be a pain, but there is a better way. Here’s a trick I learned a few years back while managing a database for a client.

  1. Copy the file path that you have placed the files in.
  2. Open a DOS shell by going to Start / Run and type in CMD, then hit ok.
  3. In the command prompt, type in dir “filepath” (don’t forget the quotation marks, you can paste by right clicking), then hit enter.
  4. It will display the names of the files in text format.
  5. Drag your cursor over the names, and right click to copy them.
  6. From there you can paste the names into whatever application you want.

Note: you may need to right click in the title bar of the DOS shell and under options turn on Quick Edit Mode and Insert Mode.

Tags: , ,

3 comments

Jan 22

The PDF Diet

Categories:

Design

by stevetruett

Do you deal a lot with PDF files at your job? If so you’ve probably run across files that are gigantic in size. This can be a real pain, especially if your exchange server account has a small storage limit. 1 or 2 high resolution PDF’s can max out your inbox in short order.

Most people don’t know that there is a very easy way to reduce the file size of a PDF, if you have Acrobat Professional.  Just go to the advanced menu, and click on PDF Optimizer. This will bring up a dialog box, listing image settings. Here you can reduce the resolution of images in PDF’s (which more often than not, are the culprit behind why the file size is gigantic). If you don’t intend to print the pdf, but just have someone look at it on screen, you can reduce the resolution of all images down to 72 dpi. (in some cases I stick with 120 dpi if the PDF dimensions are small, as Acrobat has a habit of zooming in on small documents). Go ahead and leave all the other settings on their default, then hit OK. Acrobat will prompt you to save the new file you’re about to create, I usually just tack on “-optimized” to the end of the name, just in case I need the hi-res file later on.

I’ve shared this technique with my team, and it’s been given the loving nickname of the “PDF Diet”.  It’s not uncommon for 10 mb files to be reduced to a few 100k, it works wonders and you won’t have to worry about getting the stink eye from your co-workers next time for maxing out their in-box. : )

Tags: , , , ,

2 comments