A now, completely empty inbox. Pretty scary huh?

A Solid Inbox Strategy

I didn’t want to just clean everything out; I also wanted to get some sort of strategy in place so that I wouldn’t end up in the same mess in a couple of weeks. I adapted/extended Gina’s ‘Trusted Trio’ to better suit my needs. Gina is very tough with her: ‘Just Three Labels’ system, but unlike me, she probably have several hundred emails to get through every day. I like things to be a little bit more organised so I sat up a few more labels to help me out..

Spring Cleaning

First of all I completely molested Gmail’s search box and filters to get rid of everything I didn’t need. I deleted all the crazy Facebook, Flickr and other completely useless notifications from eBay and PayPal. I made sure I didn’t delete my sent message by putting a ‘–in:sent’ in most of the queries, but take a look at the syntax and try for yourself. Filters are pretty handy if you want to quickly get rid of all your junk. The favourite query for me was ‘in:anywhere –in:sent -kasper’ my first name filtered out an insane amount of SPAM. Obviously this wouldn’t have worked if my email address had been kasper@gmail.com.

Labels: Three or Ten?

The perfect Gmail setup

I filtered my ‘All Mail’ folder down to 524 of which a few hundreds of them, were ‘Sent Messages’. I set up 10 static labels and a few dynamic ones which I intend to use for things such as clients and stuff that will be relevant for a while but can eventually go into the archives.

As you can see I have the ‘Trusted Trio’ at the very top, the prefixes for all the categories are just to keep them in order.

1. -1FollowUp is for messages that take more than 2 minutes to respond to, if it takes less, just respond on the spot. The idea is to keep your inbox empty at all times.
2. -2Hold are emails that you want to keep around for a few days or possibly a week or two.
3. -3Archive is for everything that you want to keep but doesn’t need right now. Bee crude and delete 95% of all your emails, – you know you will never need them.

If you are happy with this ‘three labels and out’ then, you practically don’t need any more. Gmail’s search feature is so exceptionally powerful that no labels can make up for it.

I also created the ‘Grumpy Quartet’ and the ‘Dynamic Trio’. The ‘Grumpy Quartet’ is for emails that will definitely come back and bite you at some point in time. This is where I save all my family and friends messages, just to prove them wrong whenever they try to convince me that they emailed me the correct date and time when they did not. It’s for all my Uni work that I need to get around to at some point, and for the receipts you can never find when you need them. I also occasionally like to save a few fly fishing notes in there.

The Dynamic trio are taken care of by filters; they don’t go into my inbox but are still marked as unread. Just set up a filter like ‘From: @ebay’ and filter those into your eBay Label. The ‘Social’ label takes care of all my Facebook, Flickr and Twitter activity.

My inbox is now completely empty, it’s a pretty lonely sight at first but I’m sure I will get used to it.

All the web projects I work on need custom written CSS stylesheets. While some elements like classes and id’s might be the same most of them aren’t. I always design everything from scratch, I know some work of off templates but I feel it limits the creative process and encourage cutting corners. You want every design/client to be as unique as possible, but some things can be automated.

I use WordPress for most of my web design work, and I’m about to give you a reason for doing that as well ;) if you don’t already.

I use two pre written stylesheets in almost all projects. I use the reset-styles.css written by Eric Meyer, and my own content stylesheet.

Resetting Browser Styles

Most if not every imaginable browser on the market apply its own set default styles to every web page they feed to the user. This means that if you don’t define certain styles like margins and line-height, then the browser will define them for you. As every browser defines these styles differently, you will not get any consistency unless you define them yourself. By using Mr. Meyers stylesheet you ensure that you reset all browser styles to zero. This does two things for you:

1. It gives you consistency across browsers.
2. It ensures that you don’t forget to define the styles that will screw up your precious design.

Reset your stylesheets to improve browser compatibility

Just download the stylesheet and put it in the same folder as your main stylesheet and use the @import command to apply them to your design.

Custom WordPress Post Styles

Now that you have reset all your styles you will want to define them. I like to think of this as applying my own default stylesheet to all browsers. If you don’t define any styles all you headers (h1, h2, h3 etc.) will all look the same, your list (ul, ol) will look like plain text.

The Solution

There are certain content styles that won’t deviate much from one design to the design. For the web, you mostly use a line-height of 1½ or 2 times the font size. You list items will have slightly more ‘air’ between them and they will be slightly indented. Your headers will decrease in size from <h1> through to <h6>. I have created a stylesheet that assigns a default value to all these elements so you don’t have to do it every time.

WordPress generate a lot of styles on the fly that makes it easy to make this consistent over many designs. One of the things that I have found useful is to style all my images according the align property assigned by WordPress. When you insert an image in your post, you choose how you want to align it, and WordPress will automatically give the <img> an appropriate class. You also have the ability to use captions from within the image editor, this will also trigger WordPress to assign a certain class to the image. These styles are consistent across all WP sites, so why not apply you own values to these as well. Remember, we are only concerned with content styles that will be the same on the majority of designs.

Some of the styles in the css file include consistent styling for images aligned left, right or centred. It ensures that the image captions will show up nicely no matter how your layout varies. Blockquotes will be slightly indented with a background image and a background colour. All the list and paragraphs will have defined line-heights, margins and padding.

Right, Show me the Meat!

This save a tremendous amount of time and the values are consistent across most designs. You can easily go in and edit the content stylesheet to suit your needs. The colours used in the document are all listed at the top, so it’s just a matter of using the find/replace command if you want to change all of them at once.

Download

Go grab the zip file or have a look at the demo page.

The zip file includes all the files and images you need. Just leave the folder hierachy intact and you are good to go.