Boost your day with Bridge

Ever got lost in your mail, blog or communities in the morning and waited to long to search the local network for your project folder to get things started? Here is – next to the cup of coffee – the second best way to boost your day.

What you need:
- Mac OS X
- Adobe Bridge
- (Remote) folder you’re working in lately

What to do:
1. Add Adobe Bridge to your Dock
2. Put an Alias from your latest (remote) design folder on your Desktop
3. Wake up the next morning
4. Go to work
5. Drag the Alias to the Bridge icon in your Dock
6. Bridge jumps to the folder previewing all contained files

Another tip:
- Drag a file or folder from finder to the Bridge icon in your Dock to enjoy the Bridge-view

Note:
- In Bridge you can also create shortcuts to folders in the shortcuts panel, but they disappear on mouse-click when the actual location has been changed, or when there is no network connection to get the remote files. So using above method will enable you to skip the shortcuts panel in Bridge, and expand your thumbnail-view.

Save time; save workspace.

Ever curious about the total amount of time searching for certain tools/properties when designing anything in heavily armed interfaces like Photoshop or InDesign?

Perhaps you’re on a single screen at home, and working less intensive as you do at the office. It would be nice to have less tools and panels filling your screen and bring focus to the stage.
Try a different workspace when you’re at the office, for example when you’re using an extra screen to extend your desktop. Think about expanding all your popular panels and totally fill your extra screen with panels from top to toe.

1. Experiment on different sets of workspaces, for different situations.
Switch, expand and collapse the panels untill you found the workspace best suited for your set up.

2. Save all workspaces.
Start using names like ExtendedDesktop_01, SingleScreen_01, Prototyping_01, Webdesign_01. Hell you can even combine them to ExtendedDesktop_Webdesign_01 just knock yourself out..

3. Customize your panels.
Figure out as much ‘librarish’ functionalities as you can (like templates, components, themes, color swatches, object styles, type styles etc. etc.). Now you can also save workspaces by project-name or style-guide. Did you know you can save some presets – like your color swatches – as independent files? Save them to your design folders in the project directory!

4. Make your favourite workspaces your own
Now is the the time to be consistent and cool down on the workspace boogie. Just keep it the way you like and train yourself to be an armed and dangerous action hero.

Shazam!