You can download the Plug-in Creator yourself and make your own version (and set the command keys of your choice) or you can download our file and simply drop it in the plug-ins folder located in User >> Library >> Application Support >> Coda >> Plug-ins and enjoy this feature immediately.

Download our SaveAll Plug-in 

Once the plug-in is installed, access it via the Plug-in menu item or
use Key Command: Option + Command + S.

Atlanta, GA (16toads Design) February 6, 2010 -- Capping off a very busy and productive year,16toads Design's TheVilePlutocrat.com took home a Silver Addy in the category of Interactive Web Design, HTML at the 2010 Atlanta Addy's. TheVilePlutocrat.com was also honored with 2009 International Davey Silver Awards in the categories of Blog Design and Political Site Design and won a 2009 International Academy of Visual Arts and the W3 Gold Award for Outstanding Political Blog and two 2009 International Academy of Visual Arts and the W3 Silver Awards for Visual Appeal and Online Newspaper.

Herodontics.com, another major 16toads Design project during the past year, has also received a great deal of recognition in the form of three Silver 2009 International Davey Awards for the categories of Social/Networking, Promotional Branding and Display Advertising B-to-C and two 2009 American Graphic Design Awards for Web Site Design and Logo Design.

Over the past year, 16toads Design also completed a large Expression Engine development project for eChalk, and has begun the new year by welcoming the National Association of Social Workers - Illinois Chapter as a new client for a complete web site overhaul!

Contact:
Paul Burton, CEO (Creative Excellence Officer) and Designer
16toads Design
678-842-9237
information@16toads.com
www.16toads.com

Odd name.  Outstanding design.

This project will be one of the largest ExpressionEngine development projects we have undertaken and we are particularly excited about the challenge.  

eChalk's new website utilizes more than ten custom-designed templates to create a visually engaging user experience. Multiple ExpressionEngine add-ons, such as Structure, Playa, Field Frame, and Sitemap were employed to fulfill their technical specifications and ease-of-use requirements.  Their new administrative interface makes it easier than ever to modify content site-wide.  Virtually every aspect of the site can be changed by internal site administrators.  In addition, multiple member groups were created to allow external authors to contribute content to their press section and blog.

Overall, we couldn't be happier with the final product and are happy to report that our clients are equally pleased.

Visit the site http://www.echalk.com

Without expounding on some very intelligent commentary from another UK designer I am growing to respect more and more, @monooso, my purpose in following up on this thread is an attempt to clarify what I believe to be at the heart of the "outrage".

The outrage resulting from a perfectly valid opinion began when a commenter referenced the newly launched website of a prominent UK designer by sharing his opinion, "it was a clean site but it was nothing spectacular" and explained, "I felt all of the praise was because of who he was rather than the quality of his site's re-design." Given the context of Mr. Dawes post, this comment is absolutely valid and in no way disparaged the design or designer.

Nonetheless, outrage boiled over with a few highly respected designers who made it clear that it is not appropriate to criticize (other high profile designers) in a public forum - regardless of whether or not the criticism is related to the topic at hand.

It seems to me that the crux of the argument goes something like this ...

It is apparently not acceptable:

• to criticize a designer's work in a public forum, like Twitter

Apparently, the time an place for criticism:

• is in person, at a pub over a pint or glass of Scotch

I've got two words that would easily suffice for describing how ridiculous this newly created "creative code of behavior" is, but because it is apparently not "ethical" to:

• mention other designers by name or reference their work in a public forum
• use a viable design example to bolster an opinion (as long as that example is a friend of a respected designer)

I will simply refer to said argument as:

• a bunch of egotistical ninnies who have allowed their britches to get a little too big as a result of their relative standing in the design community

Logic would dictate ...

If it is perfectly acceptable to use Twitter (or, another public forum) to:

• broadcast a new design and invite commentary
• state an opinion about a design or designer
• refer to a design as "brilliant", "genius", "inspiring", or "extraordinary"
• anoint a designer "the best designer in the world"
• generally "kiss ass" 

… in order to promote what are, often times, ordinary design solutions, then

It is also acceptable to use Twitter (or, another public forum) to:

• question the validity of an opinion or statement
• criticize 

Otherwise, there is a bit of a double standard if you ask me. You can't have praise without criticism, just like you can't have coffee without the diuretic component. Praise and criticism go hand-in-hand.

If it is perfectly acceptable to use 140 characters to offer unsupported praise, then it is also perfectly acceptable to use 140 characters to offer criticism. You can't have one without the other.

Stating that the "only acceptable time and place" for criticism is out of public earshot over a pint of beer is pointedly absurd. We work in a highly connected visual medium. Nearly everything we do is for public consumption and that means that everything we do is also up for public critique. I can't imagine that these design superstars are as fragile as ... well, I could be wrong. It's tough being the alpha dog.

Never once have I ever assumed that everyone who sees my work will love it, and never once have I ever assumed that people did not have a right to critique my work in the public space. One person's opinion will have little to no bearing on my career, and I am not thin-skinned enough that I can't take a valid critique.  

During my career as an art student, I endured brutal public critiques of my work on a weekly basis. I learned to appreciate "artistic distance". I also learned to look for ways to improve my craft and my skills.  Critiques are invaluable and necessary for artistic development. They are also invaluable for learning how to help other creatives. As long as a rationale is substantiated, it shouldn't matter if the commentary about your work is positive or negative.

It's not like you are telling your brother that his wife's mustache was wiped on her upper lip by his best friend … that's when meeting in person over a pint is required to cushion the blow.

Being a professional designer means I have as much right to respectfully criticize your work as I do praise it . Especially, if you are the best designer in the world.

What is truly unacceptable:

Imagine my surprise ... 

It's one thing to imitate the design of another designer. An easy argument can be made that we have all been inspired by another designer's work at some point in our careers ... It's something else entirely to claim to have produced work you had absolutely no hand in creating.

Hotshot design studios like Erskine and uber-talented independents like Shaun Inman have complained bitterly in the past about having their logos, design concepts, and code "ripped off" by talentless hacks. Elliot Jay Stocks's recent article in .Net Magazine asks how we can Thwart the Design Thieves.  I have never seen anything like this before.

My own opinion on the matter is that it's fine to be inspired, just don't copy something verbatim and call it original ... Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but you had better damned well not be using my work to sell your design services.

I'm willing to bet that every other sample in Curvect's portfolio is stolen, so please pass this along if you recognize any of the other work and help me shut them down. 

Rest assured that I will be sending Curvect a highly charged response shortly, but I wanted to get this information out there quickly enough to spread the word before they had a chance to remove anything from their web site. Interestingly enough, they have already removed their location (Hyderabad, India) and Twitter feed (@curvect) from their contact page.

Boyink described his "project wall" as a means of visually mapping all the data and resources he has accumulated about a project. The Boyink method involves taping every scrap of paper and post-it note alongside hand written annotations and drawn correlations on a giant white board for a given ExpressionEngine development project - The same way detectives map the correlations between events and criminals on a wall in every single cop show you have ever seen.

For us old timers, this analog method of tracking the progress of a project is as familiar as sketching concepts with a pencil (before turning to the computer to render a design comp). Now that I've dated myself appropriately, why should you care about an archaic method of managing a project? SImple. It works ... Really well. As Boyink opined, there is no better way to visualize the scope and iterative progress of a project with numerous moving parts. 

There is a problem with this method: It requires space. Lots of space.

Prior to getting married and moving into a much smaller home office space, I taped and pinned resource material to the wall in my office in exactly this manner. I didn't have a white board. When I moved out of that house, I spent a couple days spackling and painting in an effort to repair the damage. That was five years ago. I tried unsuccessfully to find an alternative White Board method, such as by spreading projects out on the floor. This worked reasonably well until we adopted our cat who, in turn, discovered a giant litter box. I've attempted to White Board on what little wall space is available in my office only to become frustrated by having to bend over a large desk and a big monitor in order to reach the wall. I gave up on white-boarding only to discover that my memory is not as good as I needed it to be in order to remember everything I need to remember when building an EE web site. Details get lost and, as a result, time gets wasted.  

Enter Curio

Zengobi's Curio was developed by former old school ad guys to replace the analog White Board. I stumbled on Curio last year and had a white-boarding epiphany. Because most of my clients are remote and most of the source materials they supply to me are in digital format, I've found that Curio saves me a ton of time preparing projects for development and managing projects during development. I can literally dump every file and scrap of relevant information I collect into a space(s) and organize all the digital assets in any manner I choose.

The biggest benefit of Curio is something Boyink touched on in his presentation. With few exceptions, because he works out of the home, it isn't always possible, nor desirable, to invite a client to your home office to see the project scope taped to your office wall. Curio allows you to save your walls (idea spaces) in HTML or PDF formats so you can post them to the web or send them via email to your clients for discussion.  

The second biggest benefit of a digital wall is that once the project is over, you have a complete record of the project, so if your client requests a major site expansion a year later, you can simply reopen the specific Curio wall and quickly get reacquainted with the project. Once an analog "wall" is dismantled after a project is completed, your record of the projects' progression is gone.

Lastly, digital white boards save paper. 

Since adopting Curio for creating my project "walls", I typically have a project Idea Space open for easy access and nearly constant update. Courtesy of years of collecting computer hardware, I now enjoy the awesome benefit of a two-monitor set up that allows me to have Curio open on one entire screen and all my design apps open in another.  Obviously, for those of you who don't have 57" of screen to utilize, the same issue applies - the more screen real estate you have the more efficient Curio becomes. But, as long as you know a few key commands or utilize Spaces (Mac users), one monitor will easily suffice.

A screenshot of an early stage Curio white board ("project wall").

I'm not going to provide a detailed review of Curio, other than to say it is akin to a digital Swiss Army knife for creative professionals. It does everything from project management to mind maps to brainstorming to, well, nearly everything. Developing sites with ExpressionEngine necessitates well-developed organizational and planning techniques and Curio is a tool that will help you keep track of an, often times, complicated development process.

It is always nice to get a glimpse for how other creatives work because it invariably helps me to improve my own processes. Boyink's presentation was no exception as I have already incorporated a couple of his ideas into my own Curio white boards (as seen above in the expanded detail of the weblog/page checklists). Thanks Mr. Boyink.

If you have trouble managing projects and don't have the wall space to put up white boards, do yourself a favor and have a look at Curio.  

Check out the new site here http://www.abbeyinsuranceagency.com/

Our task will be to completely revamp and upgrade an old ExpressionEngine implementation so that it is easier for internal site administrators to update content and keep the site fresh, while leveraging advances in the CMS.

Creative professionals are under a daily assault from external sources attempting to devalue our work. We are constantly being told, often times by colleagues, that to compete in the "global marketplace" we have to provide our hard-earned skills and talents nearly free-of-charge. Spec "contests", work-for-hire agreements, and the RFP process devalue our profession even further by encouraging professional creatives to forgo their integrity in order to land "needed" work.  Now, a respected company is taking advantage of crowdsourcing and is legitimizing a creative outlet that, quite literally, devalues our profession with each and every sale.

In the end, yes, an easy argument can be made that having another company jump on the crowdsourcing bandwagon means little to "real" designers. I often hear designers make statements like "the people who will buy these logos are not your customers anyway"  or "why shouldn't a low-cost solution be available to people with low budgets?"

My answer to both these statements is simple.

Every time a designer lowers his prices to absurdly low levels to "compete" or a company like iStock decides to offer bargain-basement prices for products that we charge a fair-market price to create, it reinforces the perception that creative work is "easy" to produce and therefore not "worth" the price to hire a professional.  In the end, this hurts the entire industry from the independent web designer to the smallest studio to the most well-established agency.  Once an expectation has been set, trying to convince a buyer that your product and services provide more "value" and is therefore "worth the expense" is as pointless as arguing whether or not you need eggs to make an omelet.

No argument or defense of these practices will ever be able to counteract the negative effects of crowdsourcing and anyone willing to argue there are "levels" of buyers needs to wake up and smell the fire burning a hole in their cash account.  

And, by the way, those people, the one's who "are not your customers", talk to your customers.

If a competing designer is able to undercut my proposal by 10% and still offer the same quality of work,  that's competition.  But, if I lose a potential customer to a vendor who promised the same services for 75% less than I can deliver them, that is not competition.  That's desperation or a blatant snow job.

Competition can only be "competitive" when prices are competitive.

How many logos will a crowdsourcer have to sell to make a living wage?

Let's say for the sake of argument that the average "sale price" of logo on iStock is a generous $500, that means the designer will net $250 after iStock takes its cut.  The designer will have to sell 80 logos simply to make it to a poverty-line income of 20k. 80 logos may not sound like an unreasonable benchmark, except when you consider that most professional designers probably don't create more than a dozen successful logos per year ... and, they are not competing against hundreds or thousands of second-rate logo designs.  How in the world will a struggling crowdsourcer expect to sell enough logos to pay the bills?  It's clinically insane. The only beneficiary is iStockPhoto.

At 50% comission, iStockPhoto will become nothing more than a loan shark for designers.  I agree with the fine folks at No-Spec that Crowdsourcing is quickly becoming the scourge of our industry and don't think for a moment that the naivete of the designers who participate in this sham are not hurting your business.  If it all boils down to "marketing", who do you think is going to win?  The uber talented freelancer on a limited marketing budget or the company with millions of ad dollars to burn convincing would be clients that quality creative is cheap to produce?

One fact is inarguable, creatives, in general, are terrible businessmen and among the worst when it comes to protecting our own best interests.  Keep writing off all the iStocks as someone else's problem, excusing their clients as a "lower level" of buyer, working on "spec", making excuses for signing work-for-hire documents that strip your rights of copy, responding to an RFP, or blaming our issues on "ineffective marketing" and all you are doing is putting on blinders in an effort to avoid the bigger issues.  

 

There is not a single myopic issue that can be blamed for the problems we face as a community.  There is a litany of reasons why creative services are devalued and, in the end, we, the creative vendors, are the only ones to blame.  We are still allowing it to happen.