Tips on How to Keep Organized in Ableton Live. Hello everyone and welcome to another blog entry by Benjamin Coutts. This time I will be going on about how to keep yourself organized within Ableton Live and use it for when you do a gig using the same set up as your production setup. Step 1: The More Returns the Better When you open up Ableton Live you will be give a blank canvas to start off with. The first thing you should do is create returns for the individual instruments you will be using. Like I said in my last tip, doing this will help keep your CPU down and will help with experimenting with different effects. Step 2: Keep Things Simple Over the years I have produced I’ve recorded up to 30 channels in one arrangement and that I find is a bit much if you want to perform your tracks within Ableton. Step 3: Layering and Arranging your Key Zones When you’ve got your instruments layered with your favorite instruments, mess around with your key zones to find the best key range for each instrument.
Step 5: Keep a Designated Drum Rack. Personas and the Advantage of Designing for Yourself. What are personas good for? Update: Since the original publication I’ve received a tremendous amount of feedback concerning the definition of personas (as I anticipated). To that end, I’ve tried to incorporate all those concerns into the piece. I’ve re-ordered some things and clarified where appropriate.
Steve Portigal, whom I’ve met and whom I don’t think is insane, recently said in a presentation that “personas are user-centered bullshit”. But he didn’t stop there. ‘Personas are misused to maintain a “safe” distance from the people we design for, manifesting contempt over understanding and creating the facade of user-centeredness while merely reinforcing who we want to be designing for and selling to’ Portigal isn’t the only one to argue against personas.
Peter Merholz, in describing a recent project, found personas quite valuable: ‘So on the morning of the second day we dove into a discussion of personas – those archetypal users of the product. Definition, please? Empathy is important. Apple's design process. Posted by: Helen Walters on March 08, 2008 Interesting presentation at SXSW from Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple, who tried to assess how Apple can ‘get’ design when so many other companies try and fail. After describing Apple’s process of delivering consumers with a succession of presents (“really good ideas wrapped up in other really good ideas” — in other words, great software in fabulous hardware in beautiful packaging), he asked the question many have asked in their time: “How the f*ck do you do that?” (South by Southwest is at ease with its panelists speaking earthily.) Then he went into a few details: Pixel Perfect Mockups This, Lopp admitted, causes a huge amount of work and takes an enormous amount of time.
But, he added, “it removes all ambiguity.” 10 to 3 to 1 Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Paired Design Meetings This was really interesting. Simple process to estimate times and costs in a web project. After my previous article about a structured process to develop a web application I received some requests from my readers which asked to me to dedicate a post about how to estimate times and costs of a web project.
In this articles I want to illustrate a simplified top-down process to estimate times and costs of a web process using a simple spreadsheet (in this example I used Google Spreadsheets but if you prefer you can use Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice Spreadsheet or a free online service such as Zoho or EditGrid). Process main phases In this simple top-down estimate process you can identify five main phases: 1. Define Activities 2. The process start with a general definition of macro-activities and with a detailed definition of tasks, human resources used, times and costs related to each task. 1. In this first phase you have to define the main activities which compose your project: For example, in a generic web project you can identify the following main activities: 1. 2. 1. 2. 3. 3. 4. 1. Radio Labs - How we make websites. Windows Process Information. Super Silo Blog - Graphic design by Martijn van Dam.