contacts manager

Digital age allows us to have many friends, much more than we can deal with really. You can meet them on forumsn, through online connections, facebook, etc... and it is becoming increasingly hard to keep up with all these connections.

CRM tools (Customer Relationship Managament) have been around for a while. We now start seing what we could call FRM tools (Friend Relationship Management).

LinkedIn, Facebook can be used to keep an eye on what your "friends" are doing. But these online applications are also networking platforms, so not real "RFM" tools in my opinion.

Gist and Xobni are the real thing. These tools allows you to collect automatically information about your contacts, the way they are interconnected, the conversations you have with them thr0ugh many social channels, information about them on the internet, etc...

These are vey valuable tool, which I now use on a daily basis. They save you time, let you focus on other aspects of your business, and automate relationship management.

creating a palette for your website

I find it one of the most tricky part of the actual design process: defining your palette (or sets of palettes) for a web project.

A lot of theory is available about how to build your own palette, but unless you have done some serious studies in graphic design, pretty hard to get a good hand on the process.



Whoever you are using for the design of your sites (in house or external agency), try to ask how they came up with the palette next time you get some mock-ups... usually the answers are pretty vague.

I have tested many tools over the years trying to "automate" the process and always came across the same issue: too many choice! These palette tools give you 1000s of combinations to choose from, and you end up picking one at random (you have also websites offering selections of palettes posted by users, such as http://sa.pantone.co.uk/pages/MYP_myPantone).

Until I found this tool - the kind of tool which make you think "why did nobody else think about it before!".
http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/

Upload a picture conveying the "look and feel" you have got in mind, and the tool will extract the palette for you.

The process of defining a palette for your clients becomes then so much simpler:
1) Ask them to provide with a few photos they would like to use on the site
2) Extract the palette for each of them
3) Ask them to select between the different palettes suggested