Last year we did a round-up of the apps that make it easy to run a design company on the fly, and it’s high time we updated that list. Some things have changed, some have stayed the same, but one thing’s for sure: we’d be lost without these!

Part 1 of 2 (Matt will post his in the next few days).

Jessica’s list of must-have apps: I work exclusively on a Mac (well, two, actually) so these are all Mac-friendly.

Transmit

I was pretty meh on the subject of FTP clients until I tried Transmit. Now I don’t know what I did without it.

Fluid

See above re: FTP clients and switch for site specific browsers. I finally installed Fluid on a whim and…wow, was I ever wrong. It’s given me a whole new appreciation for my Dock.

TextMate

Can’t rave enough about my love of TextMate. Makes coding a breeze.

Google Docs

We keep the majority of our paperwork (contracts, contract templates, etc.) on Google Docs. We can share amongst ourselves and access files from anywhere – handy when you’re constantly shuttling between office and home office. Also: it’s not Word!

Google Apps

We finally switched our couldbe studios email over to Google Apps, and it’s been great.

Basecamp

For all our project management needs.

Highrise

Keeps track of our contacts.

Ma.gnolia

Social linkage.

Firefox

And, of course, what’s Firefox without extensions? I use Firebug, Foxmarks, 1Password and ColorZilla.

Campaign Monitor

Not only does Campaign Monitor make it easy to send and track email newsletters, it makes setting up managed accounts for clients a breeze.

Reinvigorate

I personally loathe Google Analytics, but none of the other free or low-cost offerings seemed much better. Enter Reinvigorate. They’re in private beta right now, but we were lucky enough to get in. And I do mean lucky: Reinvigorate is a fabulous service, and I can’t imagine switching.

DropSend

When we’ve got to email huge files to clients or printers, DropSend is invaluable.

Blinksale

Simple and easy to use. We looked at FreshBooks, but given our requirements Blinksale is a better fit.

Mark Wyner’s presentation on Experience Design As the Sum of Its Parts was fantastic, and we liked his tattoos, too. It’s nice to be in an industry where tattoos are just part of the everyday and not something to be hidden, furtively, like a pvc fetish or a penchant for furries. At our last “day” job, we found ourselves deeply resentful of the fact that we had to keep the tattoos on our ankles covered. Now that we work for ourselves, our intricate Tengwar runes (that’s Elvish, for the less dorky among us) are free to see the light of day, assuming said day is not drenched in rain. And isn’t that what web design is really all about?

Mark Wyner’s presentation had very little to do with tattooing (or being a big dork, although he did compare the internet to ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books) and more to do with the way design and development can learn to work together to create a more useful and comprehensive whole. Basically it comes down to Information Architecture, Visual Design, Interface Markup and Functionality holding hands and playing nicely together to create sites that are not only pretty, but also functional, easy to maintain and accessible to a wide variety of consumers.

We’ve been devouring information about accessibility and semantic markup lately, so this session was particularly topical. We’ll link to the slides once we upload the pictures from the “good” camera and can decipher the URL on his closing slide. Seriously, you’d think that all those notes would have included that one vital bit of info, but you’d be wrong.

Technorati Tags:
webvisions, portland, web design, mark wyner, experience design

WebVisions, here we come! We’re ridiculously excited to be spending the next couple of days hanging out with the best of the web. If you’re in the Portland, OR area, head on over!

Technorati Tags:
webvisions, portland, web design

CouldBe Studios is finally live! We’re crazy excited. There might be dancing involved. We promise nothing.

Building this site has been a bit of a comedic adventure in Why Designers Should Hire A Designer. Despite all our proselytizing about keeping things simple, when it came to our own site we found ourselves trying to cram it full of every idea we’ve ever had. Seriously – the first iteration of the site practically did your dishes for you. And then, inevitably, we’d hit a wall. Pound our keyboards in frustration. Let the site sit for a while. Each time we came back to it we cut it down a little bit more, but there was still too much information and too little breathing room.

Finally, about a week ago, we started over. Clean slate, blank page. We had a brainstorming session in which we wrote down the three most important goals of couldbe studios: being able to offer affordable, quality design to people who don’t think they’ll be able to hire a designer; making accessible, standards-compliant sites; and providing complete identity solutions to small and home-based businesses. With those three things hanging out all by themselves on a piece of notebook paper, we went back to designing our site – and we knocked the whole thing out in a little over a weekend. Go, us!

We’re sort of glad it took so much work to get the site going, actually. Now that we know exactly what our clients are going through, we’ll be even better at helping them through the design process. And it is a process, you know? Getting from Point A to Point B isn’t always a straight shot.

So, yeah. Have a look at couldbe studios. Drop us a line if you want to hook up with a new site or a spiffy logo. And enter your name and e-mail address in the form on this blog to get our newsletter and stay on top of our latest happenings.

The couldbe studios site: almost live. Want to be notified the moment it’s ready to go? Sign up for our handy-dandy newsletter. There’s a link in the sidebar. Nothing is stopping you.

Jumping the gun on our main site launch is the unveiling of our newest service. That’s right, folks – couldbe studios is already producing offspring. Can it be long before we start talking about diapers and preschools?

Like I was saying: Buzzverb launched today! Buzzverb is the answer to your prayers, assuming you pray for good copywriting. Who doesn’t, really? We’re excited, because it means we can flex our writing muscle for creating more than just code.

Since November is National Novel Writing Month, and in honor of our auspicious launch, Buzzverb has decided to bring you 30 days of links to the best writing resources on the web. 30 links in 30 days! Whether you’re doing NaNoWriMo or not, this isn’t something you’ll want to miss.

Well, Webvisions 2006 has come and gone.

For CouldBe it was an eye opening experience. Our creative juices are now overflowing with ideas sparked by the seminars.

You can see some of our pics from the event here.

So Far today:

Bulletproof web design: Dan Cederholm
Freakin’ Sweet. I felt completely excited and full of ideas of stuff to try and how this all fits in with the work that CouldBe is doing and want to be doing more of.
Improving Front-End Architecture: Garrett Dimon
A lot of interesting, if not exciting information.
Unleashing CSS (How I learned to stop worrying and love IE7): Christopher Schmitt
Some useful information, although unfortunately the speaker was somewhat difficult to understand.
Beyond Just Content (Websites as interactive applications): William Rogers
Unfortunately, this seemed to be 1 part advertisement for the speaker’s company and 1 part long, somewhat boring history of the internet. Literally starting with electromagnets and telegraphs before painstakingly meandering his way up to day.

Scaling For Your First 100K Users: Matt Mullenweg
Just about to start…it entertains me that I’m about the hear the founder of Wordpress speak while blogging about it on a Wordpress install.

Well, I got here bright and early, picked up my badge and away we go.

Should be a full day.

My intended Schedule for today:
9:30 – CSS Bootcamp – David McFarland
2:00 – Rapid DOM/AJAX Development – Jonathan Snook
3:15 – Design Patterns For the Web – Bill Scott and James Reffell
4:30 – The AJAX Experience – Dave Johnson

If you have never been to the Oregon Convention Center, you should really find an excuse. It’s one of the most architecturally interesting spaces you are likely to find in Portand.
p.s. Thank you webvisions for providing the free wireless.

CouldBe Studios will be attending webvisions! Well, half of us, anyway. We’re ridiculously excited about getting our geek on with some of the biggest names on the internet: Adobe, Google, Yahoo!, Intel. Plus, we’ll get to fanperson the superstars like Flock and WordPress, as well as rubbing elbows with local businesses. Good stuff.