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Home - Pencil Project. The Power of Mind Maps to Build Your Career Master Plan. This past week, I worked with one of my clients from the career coaching program to create her career master plan. She is a young, smart, and motivated entrepreneur finding her way in this world. She has lots of great ideas with plenty to offer the world. What we needed to do for her was to build her career master plan with a mind map through brainstorming, idea organization and categorization. We decided to accomplish this using the most powerful tool I know, a method that I have often used with clients, students as well as in my own projects, that of mind mapping!

“Mind map is a picture outside your brain of how your brain thinks inside.” ~Tony Buzan Tweet this quote. A Simple Introduction to Mind Mapping Mind maps help you think the way your brain was designed to think and organize and process information. You can apply mind maps to just about anything, from writing a book to creating a marketing plan to simplifying your bills. Mind maps have many levels. You have a purpose. TagCrowd: make your own tag cloud from any text. New Year's Resolutions on 43 Things. 20 tips for a successful side project | Career.

Every designer should have a side project. But whether you're developing a world-changing startup, an enterprise to eventually replace your day job, or just something fun, you’ll inevitably be sacrificing your spare time. So it's important to make those precious hours count. How? Here's a series of tips to help you on your mission. 01. It’s tempting to keep adding features and details to your project because you want it to be perfect from day one.

It's important not to overcomplicate on your first iteration. Focus on your first version, and worry about all the problems that might occur if you’re successful once they're closer to being a reality. 02. Above all, your side project should be about something you're passionate about. If you're looking for an opportunity to eventually break from your day job and generate income, don’t let this dampen your passion and guide all your decisions. 03. Choose something familiar and develop more expertise in it. 04. 05. Empathy Visual awareness 06. Free Project Tracking Software, Online Collaboration Tool. GanttProject: free desktop project management tool. 7 reasons why mood boards are worth the extra time | Graphic design. Mood boards are a collection of assets and patterns that eventually evolve into a style guide. They exist as a designer’s tactile and visual sandbox, a place where they can openly experiment with the different facets of a design.

Mood boards allow creatives the ability to show clients and colleagues a proposed look without investing too much in a failed direction. My design career has been primarily digital in nature; a field in which mood boards are more beneficial than many may realise. At Digital Surgeons, we use mood boards to establish an overarching visual language on a brand, product or site level. With an entire ecosystem of digital devices taking the world by storm, the need for design systems is more apparent than ever. 01. Just because the final design will be digital doesn’t mean the mood board has to be. 02. Mood boards help to establish all of the baselines that will eventually go into a style guide: color palettes, typography, layout, image treatments. 03. 04. 05. 06. 07. Toodledo : A to-do list to organize your tasks. Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done.

Easel.ly | create and share visual ideas online. Citation Machine. WorkFlowy - Organize your brain. Project management software — easy and absolutely free! To do lists. Mind maps. 10 Fun Tools To Easily Make Your Own Infographics. People love to learn by examining visual representations of data. That’s been proven time and time again by the popularity of both infographics and Pinterest. So what if you could make your own infographics ? What would you make it of? It’s actually easier than you think… even if you have zero design skills whatsoever. Below are my two favorite infographic-making web 2.0 tools that I highly recommend. Click the name of each tool to learn more! Visual.ly One of the more popular ways to discover infographics, Visual.ly actually just launched a design overhaul of their website.

Dipity Want to get a beautifully simply visualization of data over time? Easel.ly I absolutely love Easel.ly. Venngage Venngage (likely named for Venn diagrams) is a double threat. Infogr.am One of the most simple tools, Infogr.am lets you actually import data right into the site and then translate it all into useful visualizations. Tableau Public Photo Stats This one’s an iPhone app that’s worth trying out. What About Me?