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- December 4, 2011
Design Candidate for 4×6″ StickyPad ETP
December 4, 2011Read more
I spent a good chunk of Sunday redesigning the Emergent Task Planner to fit onto a 4×6 recipe card. I’m pretty pleased with the result. The picture above shows a stack of printed ETP designs. The bottom is the 8.5×11 ETP pad you can buy from Amazon. The middle pad is a custom A5 design I did for a company in Spain, and the very top is the mocked-up 4×6 sitting on a pile of 4×6 index cards.
The 4×6″ size is designed for printing on re-stickable paper notes (like a Post-It®) that Papergraphics can handle. Since the area is about half of the already-small A5 design, I had to simplify the design quite a bit more. This one is based on the Mini-ETP 7-Task Design, with a redrawn day grid and a more tightly-defined base grid.
There’s one more tiny adjustment I’d like to make (the spacing at the top), and then I’m going to send the design to the printing guys and have them made. I’m hoping to have them up in the Amazon store in time for the new year.
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UPDATE: This is a version that has the standard 14 hours, which gives more room for writing.
If you have any comments or requests, feel free to leave ’em here or in the design synopsis I posted in my process blog.
- December 4, 2011
Shrinking the ETP
December 4, 2011Read moreThis weekend I set aside the time to make a 4 by 6 inch version of the Emergent Task Planner. Working from the half-sized version of the ETP, which already makes serious compromises, I had to somehow squeeze all the old elements into a much smaller space. Here’s what it looks like:
The left side shows the half-sized ETP overlaid on the 4×6″ template. The right size shows the resized version. I had to make several more adjustments, and ended up redrawing most of the form.
- November 28, 2011
2012 Compact Calendar Updates
November 28, 2011Read more
I’ve just updated the USA Compact Calendar for 2012. It’s the same “Candy Bar of Time” you know and love, with a few new features:
- Start the calendar on any arbitrary date
- Month Separation Lines (thanks to Daniel Kinal for the tip)
- Improved 1st Day highlighting
- Improved Day Abbreviations
- US Letter and A4-size PDFs included
In addition to these new features, I’ve also made a short video that describes how to modify the calendar’s starting date, length, and color formatting. So check out the updated calendar.
I’ve noticed that quite a few of the international versions of the Compact Calendar are using old versions of the spreadsheet; if you’re making a version for your own country, I encourage you to update to the latest spreadsheet base.
Jump to the official Compact Calendar 2012 Edition Page
- November 22, 2011
European Store Now Open for Emergent Task Planner Pads
November 22, 2011Read moreAfter a couple of months of experimenting with E-commerce plugins, we’ve finally gotten the new European Store ready for taking orders. Your order will be submitted via email (don’t worry, you won’t be asked for any credit card info), and then my collaboration partner Al Briggs will send you instructions on how to do a secure payment. If you are in the United States, please continue to use my Amazon Shop.
- November 19, 2011
Banging on Keys
November 19, 2011Read moreWhen I was a bored pre-teen, I used to sit at the family piano and hit keys on it, trying to figure out how they worked. I knew music somehow came out of it, but music itself eluded me. I was too caught-up in why music was music. WHY WERE THERE BLACK KEYS AND WHITE KEYS? WHY IS MIDDLE C NOT RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE? SHOULDN’T IT BE THE KEY EXACTLY IN THE MIDDLE? And so on. Not finding any joy in being forced to play the piano for the sake of playing someone else’s music, I never followed up on it. I did have two years of band in junior high school, when I played the flute very badly. And also from the 4th through 8th grade, I used to play the harmonica, working out how to play hymns because that seemed to be the only music that would play on a C Major harmonica. It drove me nuts when I discovered that there were other kinds of harmonicas, including ones with the ability to transpose with a little button. Eventually, I discovered computer graphics and was distracted by the wonders of code for the next 30-some years.
I’m 43 now, and it occurs to me that maybe now I’m capable of finding my own answers. I’ve done research here and there, as I’ve learned about digital audio and waveform synthesis. I’ve also gained an appreciation of music as a kind of arrangement of elements, and therefore composition is hugely interesting to me. It always struck me that there was some kind of emotional logic behind notes, scales, and their maddeningly illogical arrangement on the keyboard. I’ve talked to musicians and have been listening to jam sessions, courtesy of the awesome people at our local music temple Studio 99. I’ve sat through hours of piano practice with my pianist friend Angela, striving to listen for what she was listening for. The conclusion I’ve come to is that it may be worth starting again from age six, but this time paying attention to my questions so I can answer them in my own way.
With that, I’ve dragged out an old Kurzweil SP88 Electric Piano, 88 keys of weighted action, and have plugged it into the stereo to answer some of those old questions.
