I am by no means a graphic designer, but thankfully in my job I do get the opportunity to exercise my creative/artistic juices from time to time. Recently I’ve been working on updates to materials for our “East Coast Plane Trip“, a fall visitation program for students from (you guessed it) the East Coast. Our logo was in need of a major overhaul, and here’s what I came up with: I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, but none of it would have been possible without kuler, one of my newest sources for design inspiration. With no color theory background to my credit,...

When Facebook announced the ability for companies and organizations to create their own “pages” on the network, it was something that we quickly decided was worth pursuing.  Thus was born the Hope College Admissions page on Facebook.  I knew this would be a great avenue for facilitating conversation among graduates of Hope and for providing unique content to prospective students. When I stumbled across a $100 credit available for Facebook Ads, I knew there was some real potential there for driving traffic to our Page on Facebook.  Here’s what we came up with: I have to admit that...

One of the great things about my job is that I am able to spend a lot of time reading about and researching new tech opportunities for our office.  The only downside to this is that there is a ton of noise out there — from fledgling startups to seemingly important blog posts to Twitter action that’s interesting, but not necessarily relevant to my work. It’s gotten to be so much that I’ve been keeping NetNewsWire closed during the day so that I’m not continually distracted by new items from my feeds.  I have become more reliant on to-do lists to get things done,...

If you are like me, you are always trying to figure out the best way to keep track of items on your to-do list.  I have gone from Remember The Milk to a spiral notebook to iPhone “Notes” (and the list goes on).  While I wait for Gmail (Hope is a Google Apps school) to launch its to-do functionality, I thought I would share one tool that has served me well for the last several months and that I will probably stick with for some time. Ta-da List (from 37 signals) came highly recommended to me as a “free and simple” way to manage my daily tasks.  It allows you to create as many...

This week I stumbled across ParticleTree, a web development blog.  Prominently featured on the blog is a service called Wufoo, a project by the authors of ParticleTree.  They tout the service as making forms “easy + fast + fun.”  I couldn’t agree more! If you don’t have someone in your office that knows programming well enough to develop online forms and/or your IT department is swamped, Wufoo could be a great solution for you.  In addition to a ton of template ideas, Wufoo also provides a variety of CSS options, meaning that you can really customize the form the way you...