Laura Marling The Needle And The Damage Done from TheMemeticArchitect on Vimeo.

Layout your design

It’s pretty easy – just design your item (let’s say a name tag) like you would any other design. Put in some dummy text for now, no problems.

Create your data

You’ll need the information you’re going to use in a tab separated .txt file – you can do this by exporting it from Excel or Numbers. Put in column headings – InDesign needs them. Something tricky to note here, InDesign can Data Merge image files if you like – but their column heading needs to start with an @ symbol, and their content needs to be a relative path to the image file you’re going to merge. eg- “/images/variable-named-image-.jpg”.

Hook up your data

Pick your data file through the Automation -> Data Merge Panel -> Select Data Source link in InDesign. Then the panel will list out the values you can data merge – just drag these out into the appropriate text/image boxes in your file. And that’s it – you can preview values using the preview function on the Data Merge Panel, or just hit the Create Merged Document link and you’re done. Now that wasn’t so hard – and didn’t need a 10 page tutorial + video to explain.

1. People who can’t spell, but take the time to spell check and correct errors.
2. People who can’t spell and don’t care.

For some reason, somewhere along the line, someone thought it was a brilliant idea to put a napkin underneath food when giving it to a customer – that person was wrong.  Why someone would think that a napkin isn’t going to get stuck to the bottom of food is beyond my mere mortal brain capacity. Especially things like toasted sandwiches that have melting cheese, it’s just a recipe for disaster. I’ve even had this conversation with a hospitality teacher who said they didn’t know where it came from and they never ever teach students to do it.

So where did it come from? And can it please go back there now?

Yes, I really need that on the homepage.

The all to familiar conversation that tends to come up with every client at some point. The odd desire to take the lazy route of putting everything as a menu item, or simply (and I use that word sarcastically) deciding to use drop down menus instead of thinking the problem through and doing a bit of information architecture to come up with a solution that is not only better visually, but also means more users will find more of what they want, more of the time.

This problem is always compounded in a business scenario where the in-house web guy gets “told” that certain things need to go on the homepage. The problem of course is that in this setting, everyone is certain that what they are working on is definitely worthy of homepage status, or worse still, the ever-desired mantle of top-level navigation status.

Can’t you just add Staff Casual Day next to Products and Services?

It’s at this point that unless someone is willing to put themselves through an arguement, they usually lose to a less knowledgeable higher power who just wants their way.  I say it’s worth the argument. Persist, and your site will be better for it.  Structure your content in a clear way, not in the way that the client or the boss describes it.  Think of the users, make it easy for them which 99% of the time means keeping it simple.

What we don’t mean is “can I access internet banking on my iPhone” – because we’re not stupid, we know that we can we just want to know if you’re going to give us a better option, which the ANZ one is.  

The Apple mobile web browser, Safari, displays web pages on iPhones with the same clarity and detail as can been seen through desktop computer web browsers.

[Our] work in this area aims to give customers the ability to do everything they already do on their desktop while they’re on the go. 

Unfortunately I can’t do everything I want on the go – I can’t quickly get to my account balances, I can’t read the balance without first zooming into their archaic interface, I also can’t use all the functions that are only available to Internet Explorer users on a PC.

So I’ll have to say that if a certain bank doesn’t get into gear, perhaps they’re going to lose a customer or 7 million.

This is going to be good.

Office hours: 9am-5pm Monday to Thursday

So what’s up with the no working on Fridays?  Is it because I’m slack, is it because I’m are only doing this this part time, why why why?  Well, to tell you the truth, it’s to balance out my life.  Work has a habit of taking over more of lives than it should, and a large part of the work I do is outside of plusminus for the Uniting Church.  The problem, of course, in starting my own business is that free work which used to be relegated to the out-of-hours and snuck in the actual-hours at work, can now stop me getting actual work done.  So the cunning plan is this: Monday through Thursday I work work work and ignore everyone who’s not paying me money with the useful answer of “let’s talk on Friday”.  Outside of work hours I live my life with my family – good idea.  Fridays, I ignore everyone who pays me money, and do everything I wish to volunteer my time for. 

So far, so good, I’ve only had to work one Friday and it was mainly due to some Friday work seeping into a Tuesday.  Let’s hope it works out – I can say I’m probably getting just as much work done Monday – Thursday than I would Monday – Friday, and my after-work time is far less stressed.

Now I’m all for Good News Week and Diggnation, but there’s really only so much short form content you can watch and I found myself really wanting more. I looked into hacking the little thing, but all seemed too complex especially considering that I wanted a clean box for updates etc. when they come from Apple.

Then – then – the miracle happened, Australian TV shows on iTunes – this would be great, this would be marvellous, I could subscribe to season passes to all my favourite shows that we watch all the time (which admittedly isn’t many), so I crank open iTunes and look. But hang on, I’m not a 5 year old – why is 99% of this content Disney cartoon crap? Where’s the good shows? Where’s the good AMERICAN shows even? So TV shows = let down.

Fast forward a few months, this last week Apple decided to allow us poor Australians to have Movie purchase/rentals. Sceptically I looked at the list of movies – and quite frankly, they’re not that half bad. There’s nothing I’d purchase, but sure, I’d rent a bunch of them and surely this is easier than going to Blockbuster. And right I was, last night for the first time the Wife and I sat down, fired up the AppleTV and clicked our way to movie watching.

This AppleTV thing is going to catch on – and it’s going to be awesome. And even if it doesn’t catch on, stuff the rest of you, I love it.