A little while back Kevin signed me up for the Layers Magazine tip of the day. It is, as he put it, “pure goodness.” For a little while I was getting the same InDesign tip over and over. The bug has been resolved and the goodness is back. I implore you to signup for the daily tips. They will speed up your workflow significantly – which is good for me, because I tend to work suh-lowly.

Today’s tip:

Adobe Illustrator CS3 Tip – Make Your Colors Sing in Perfect Harmony

Start with any color that you create in the Color panel or select from the Swatches panel. Then look in the new CS3 panel called Color Guide (Window > Color Guide), and your selected color will be shown as the Base Color. Using this color as a starting point, you can set up harmonious Color Groups in seconds. All you need to do is select the “rules” for your Color Group setup under the Harmony Rules pop-up menu (just under the Options menu in the upper right of the panel). This will pick the perfect colors to go with your Base Color instantly. To save the resulting colors as a Color Group, look under the palette’s Options menu and select “Save Colors as Swatches.” What I love about this feature is that anyone; from a color expert who’s totally familiar with the large number of preset rules to a novice who’s color challenged, can easily make their colors sing in perfect harmony.

I wonder how different the world might look if the default ‘new meeting’ time in calendar programs were 10 minutes instead of 1 hour.

Merlin Mann asks, “What default settings would you love to change in popular applications?”

We launched the new NBCF site on Friday. Kevin designed it and a bunch of us pitched in on the development end. The coolest thing about this project is the myNBCF community section. A number of people have already created profiles and posted some pretty compelling stories. The development experience has been pretty involved the past several weeks, but overall, it’s very satisfying to be a part of something like this.