How To Brainstorm Using Google Search & Stock Photo Sites

This video is really useful for whenever you get stuck for ideas...  Chris Do runs a working session with his team for how to use 'search' as a way to get inspiration.

The key points I took from this are:

• 'To thrive in the knowledge economy you have to learn how to learn...'
• That's where searching comes in - 'use Google as a collaborative creative partner'.
• Type slowly as Google will tell you what people generally look for
• Check out the definition of the word first to make sure it means what you though
• Go to images - if in 3 flicks of the screen you can't see what you're looking for, you need to type in another word
• Start broad, then become more specific
• Add 'concept' or 'idea' or 'metaphor' after the word to go deeper 
• Sometimes Google can be a bit 'noisy', or overwhelming...  so if you're looking for images, try shutterstock or other stock image sites
• Images are very effective when they combine two separate things, to find a common thread
• Find an image you like, go into it and see what meta tags have been attributed to it.  Sometimes the words in these meta tags are just what you're looking for
• Save any image that grabs you at all
• Keep drilling down on the images you like, looking at related images or those from the same artist / photographer, until you find the ones that hit the spot

Productive Music Playlist (1.5 hrs) - October 2017 - Vol.2 - #EntVibes

Oh, just found out that Evan Carmichael puts together a playlist of productive music on a regular basis.  How great is that?!  Here's the second volume for October - enjoy :)

How to use vector graphics on the web

This video becomes a bit technical half-way through, but it's a great introduction to vector images, what they are, and why they are often used instead of the jpeg or png image files that we might be more familiar with.

Jpeg and png type files are known as rastor files: these are composed of lots of tiny dots (pixels) that make up the whole image, so they lose picture quality when they are scaled up too much.

Vector files are usually type .svg files, which stands for scalable vector graphics: these are composed of code, which the computer interprets as the image.  This means they are totally scalable, plus load times are much quicker than the pixel images.

To create vector images yourself you will need an application like Illustrator...  But if you already have the svg files then you can just upload them.  For example, if you have outsourced the creation of the images, or bought stock images already in the svg file format, then you can just use these on your websites.