Kaleidoscope International

simply dynamic creative solutions

Tools of the Trade

By KI Admin Leave a Comment

It’s pretty awesome to be living and working in this time of fast-paced technology. We keep our ear to the ground, to put it archaically, to make sure we are utilizing all the best options to keep our work flow as efficient and cost effective as possible. We test new stuff out all the time, but these are some of the main tools we use on a regular basis [you can click on any of their logos to learn more about them]:

Photoshop

We love the versatility of Photoshop. We use it for editing images, laying out websites, and most posters and print work that is more image based.

 

Illustrator

Illustrator is our program of choice for working with vector and most type-heavy projects.

 

Bridge

Navigating through a bazillion files and folders is a breeze with Bridge. Working with it is just crazy more efficient.

 

Suitcase Fusion

Indispensable font organizer/browser/tester. *love*

 

Evernote

We have a constant stream of lists and notes coming out of our ears. Thank God for Evernote. This keeps our personal, business, and client to do lists and reference notes in wonderfully synced order. We each use the desktop application to add and check off items quickly and easily and can also access it on our Galaxy Tab when we’re out and about. *love*

 

WorkTime

This is a great little program that makes records of everything you do on your computer. We can go back and run reports to see how much time we spent on projects. Sweet.

 

WordPress

WordPress is the very powerful and versatile program that we use as our Content Management System of choice.

 

Dreamweaver

David’s main coding program.

 

Firefox w/Adblock Plus (at least until Chrome gets a bookmark sidebar)

We’d be happy to switch to Chrome if they would fix some of their usability issues *eyeroll*. Firefox can be a bit of a memory hog, but we still use it pretty much 24/7. Adblock Plus is a MUST have.

 

Skype

Aside from wishing Skype would integrate right into our browser for greater efficiency and being rather unimpressed with the call quality, we’re decently happy with it. We actually use it with each other all day long to send each other links, communicate behind our kids backs, etc. We also keep ongoing conversations with some of our like-minded friends. Our business phone and voicemail is linked to our business Skype account, which has worked quite well for us with traveling and whatnot. We give it a rating of “meh” but would still hate to be without it.

 

Google Voice

Best. Texting. Solution. Ever. (so far) It’s also awesome to have control over where the number forwards to and numerous other things.

 

Neatworks

This is a very sweet receipt scanner and organization system. Good-bye bloated files and loose papers floating around. Yes, please.

 

BudgetTracker

We currently use this for our finances and accounting. We loved it in part because the company was ridiculously fast at support and  listening to and adding feature requests. For some reason they have gone rather silent, but we’re still cautiously optimistic on the potential of the highly customizable program.

 

Filed Under: Tools, We Recommend

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