use twitter on your resume

A few months ago I applied for a few upcoming part-time teaching positions (which I’m excited to let you know that I’ll be teaching digital portfolio class at a local college). Prior to applying, I thought my resume might be in need of a few touch-ups and additions before getting in touch with a few schools.

With a large portion of my work coming from clients I never meet face-to-face, supporters and blog readers from all over the online world, and work consisting of mostly online media, I thought it might be fun to incorporate some online interaction into my resume; invite the resume readers into my “online home” if you will.

The words “branding” and “personal branding” have been catching all the buzz in the past year or so because of services like Twitter and Facebook make it easy to monitor your brand through real interactions and word of mouth. Your customers, followers, supporters, etcetera are able to share their thoughts and feelings with you about your brand very easily. On the receiving end you are able to make adjustments if and where needed based on the feedback received.

twitter testimonials

Getting to the point: While I do tend to get both negative and positive feedback, I started favoriting (“starring”) the positive feedback I receive on Twitter and then linked it to my interactive or static PDF resume. I consider them my online testimonials! It’s also important to point out that I also jot down the negative, so I can improve later on.

A few of the resume recipients really enjoyed the idea, as it served as a pleasant creative twist on the standard testimonial and recommendations.

adobe acrobat color problem fix

Last week I had emailed a client two final PDF full-color logo mockups that were created in Adobe Illustrator. I received an email yesterday stating that they “didn’t like the color of brown I used.” Slightly confused, since there was only shades of blue and black used in the logo, I investigated further.

Typically when viewing PDFs on my Mac I use Apple Preview (it loads much faster and render much cleaner than Adobe Acrobat). However, my client was using Adobe Acrobat, which was causing weird discoloring of certain elements of the logo—even though some of the same parts were the exact same colors as other parts that were appearing fine even on my Acrobat. My initial thoughts was that it was possibly their settings or something similar in Acrobat).

Still confused, I sent out a tweet asking if anyone had similar experiences. Many of the responses resulted in what I thought and tried, but a tweet by Edward Qwertsih (@ludoedoed) told me to try the following (to which solved the problem):

• File » Save As…
• Type <PDF> — Click Save
• In pop up: Choose Output on the left side
• Set the Profile Inclusion Policy to ‘Include All Profiles’
• Click Save PDF

Problem solved.  To everyone that offered help: Thank you! All of your help and feedback is always greatly appreciated.

designers favorite chrome extensions

The wait is now over…. Google Chrome extensions are now live on the Mac compatible version of Chrome [download link]. I can now make Chrome my official dedicated web surfing browser!

While I’ve been using Chrome for a few months now and blown away by the speed and simplicity the one thing that was holding me back was that I couldn’t install Xmarks to sync my obsessively organized bookmark collection across my other used browsers. I was using Xmarks to sync Firefox and Safari (also sync to my iPhone via MobileMe), but until today couldn’t keep my Chrome up-to-date — and that bothered the hell out of me.

Now that Chrome is extension-ready on the Mac, I’d thought it would be interesting to hear others top 5 Chrome extensions. Feel free to share in the comments below. Anyways, here are my top 5:

1. Xmarks (surprised?) – sync your bookmarks across multiple computers and browsers. And as you read from the above, I couldn’t work/surf without this one.
2. Bit.ly Shorten Url – Shorten any URL also send a Tweet or Facebook status update from it. I like how it adds the icon to the address bar for a quick click to shrink.
3. Add to Amazon wish list – I’m always adding “things I want” to my Amazon wish list, so this makes for easy updating.
4. ChromeMilk – great way to display and update my Remember the Milk tasks. I’m a huge fan of RTM, and if you are unfamiliar read my reasons why I like it.
5. Lorem Ipsum Generator – quick way to access dummy text to use for website filler while designing.