If I haven’t already run you down in the street and yammered your ear off Todoist.com, then let me introduce you.

For years I’ve been searching for the perfect task management tool. I’ve tried all the standards, from Bugzilla to Remember the Milk but I always ended up back with Notepad.

My .txt wasn’t available from ‘the cloud’, no logical groups or filtering, and there’s no notion history. However, Notepad is FLEXIBLE! I can add, organize and reorganize my tasks however I want, whenever I want. Crazy, eh?

Enter Todoist

Todoist.com has a lot of the same features as the other tools, but it let me do things MY way! I can label, tree, sort and re-sort to my hearts content. It’s got quick and natural keyboard short-cuts, cool date-parsing date boxes, a full history, the data are fully exportable and the the price is right at $3 a month! The site even has instructional videos for getting over the short learning curve.

Don't want to forget about lunch!

Oh, and plug-ins. I use the iGoogle Gadget, FireFox plug-in, and it looks great on my beloved phone. If only there were a Thunderbird plug-in, then I might just burst into flames. Flames of affection.

And the best part, despite the plethora of features, Todoist has a fast, intuitive and SIMPLE interface. It gets out of the way and lets me track my tasks how I want to. In this age of opinionated software, it’s refreshing for a software product to work for me, instead of against me.

2 thumbs up!

One of the many hats I wear at Caxiam Group is documenting client processes and translating those into logical structures that we can turn into web application magic.  While I never tend to write any code (it makes the programmers nervous) I do my best to provide them with the best representation of how a proposed system of application feature should work and/or look.  What better to do that with than a picture?

Continue Reading “Wireframing – Finding the Right Tool for the Job”

Caxiam History 101.

Ready?

Once Ethan and I started to outline the long-term vision of our collaboration and the benefits of a merger in early 2004, establishing a new company was the next big challenge on our list.

Now I’d love to reveal some elaborate brainstorm that lasted months, and I hate to disappoint my inquisitive readers, but the CAXIAM name was truly an overnight phenomenon. It came to me as I was burning the midnight oil for a client in the home office of our shared town home. I energetically hopped to the whiteboard (yes, adrenaline can exist at 2 am) and the ideas began to outpour.

Continue Reading “The Birth of the CAXIAM Name and Branding”

Startups. Ask me what we like to do with startups during the mood boarding process. Come on, ask me.

Ok, if you insist.

Most of the startups Caxiam works with typically fall within our Web Application Development services. An idea is born, capital is raised, and our team is brought in to help the idea come to fruition on the Web. Most of the time the client has also engaged our Discovery Phase to generate detailed requirements and construct a framework for strategy & execution. Basically, by the time mood boarding kicks off, we have a great understanding of who the customer is, how they think, and what their needs are.

Continue Reading “Mood boarding. We love it, our clients love us for it (part 2)”

First, lets define mood boarding to prevent some of you from thinking I’m blabbering about some new Winter X-Games Sport (which I’ll take full credit for if someday it does). The great & powerful wikipedia describes it as:

A type of poster design that may consist of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition of the choice of the mood board creator…mood boards are often used by graphic designers to enable a person to illustrate visually the direction of style which they are pursuing.

Our creative team brushed the surface of utilizing “official” (as in, clients were aware & understood it’s part of the overall Caxiam process) mood boards over 5 years ago. It might not have completely stuck because we didn’t layer the process of choosing adjective clouds, color palettes, typography, imagery & textures in a convincing way. Or, maybe the value wasn’t organized in a way understood by the client. Regardless of the failed attempts, we kept massaging the process (realizing its potential) and have found tremendous success in making it officially part of the CG approach. Mood boarding, when done properly & involving the client strategically, can be very useful in creative collaboration.

Continue Reading “Mood boarding. We love it, our clients love us for it (part 1)”