“You can fail at what you don't want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”
― Jim Carrey
Throughout the years I've collected a few online tools and apps that make my job easier. here are my favorites and how I use them:
LIPSUM: It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32. https://www.lipsum.com/
You can use this site to upload a photo of the art and turn it into an animation! https://sketch.metademolab.com/canvas
TOGGL: Productivity & time tracker.
TELEPROMPTER: The ultimate Mac teleprompter.
THE LIGHT & AIRY PHOTOGRAPHER: Eleven presets specifically formulated to enhance phone photos. I use this with the lightroom app on my phone to edit photos quickly. My friend Devin of Play at Whim turned me onto this.
LIGHTROOM APP: Before I got this app, I was using Instagram to edit my photos. This works if the photos are just for Instagram, but it compresses them so they are either too small or blurry when you go to use them other places. I like my photos light and bright, so I either use presets or adjust the exposure and usually the tint.
PINTEREST AND THE PINTEREST SAVE BUTTON CHROME PLUGIN: I love using Pinterest to store inspiration and ideas.
INSTA VIDEOS DOWNLOADER: Simple tool for downloading Instagram Videos, Photos, Stories and IGTV Videos to your device.
BEAVER BUILDER Easily build beautiful, responsive WordPress pages in minutes. Beaver Builder is a drag and drop WordPress Page Builder. (Beaver Builder is what I use to build this site.)
UNSPLASH The internet’s source of freely useable images. Powered by creators everywhere. The photos on this site are beautiful. I've used them for client presentations and proposals. They're completely free for personal or professional use.
STOCKSY Inspiring stock photos + videos driven by creative integrity.
PICWIZARD: High Quality, Free Stock Photos
Stunning library of over 1 million stock images and videos.
Royalty free and safe for commercial use, with no attribution required
PEXELS Free stock photos you can use everywhere. ✓ Free for commercial use ✓ No attribution required.
SHARE NOTES IN ICLOUD With the Notes app on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac, you can invite people to collaborate on your iCloud notes and folders. Then you can partner on projects, plan a trip, make a grocery list, and more.
CREATIVE MARKET Creative Market is the world’s marketplace for design. Bring your creative projects to life with ready-to-use design assets from independent creators around the world. This site is a gamechanger. If you sign up for their emails, you get free downloads in an email every Monday.
PIC SPLITTER This app allows you to split a photo and generate a grid of photo tiles which contain portions of the larger photo. Upload the generated tiles to Instagram to create the illusion of massive photos on your profile page.
YAYTEXT Super cool unicode text magic. Write 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝 and/or 𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑐 updates on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere.
GETMOGI: a free, handy little tool I use for posting emojis when I'm not on my phone.
JOYPIXELS EMOJI KEYBOARD: The world's leading emoji keyboard extension for Chrome.
COLORZILLA: Get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can analyze the page and inspect a palette of its colors. It includes a Color Picker, Eye Dropper, and a Gradient Generator. Get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can analyze the page and inspect a palette of its colors.
FONT FACE NINJA: a browser extension that let you inspect, try, bookmark and buy fonts on any websites.
GOOGLE CHROME KEEP Easily save the things you care about to Keep and have them synced across all of the platforms that you use — including web, Android, iOS, and Wear. Take notes for additional detail and add labels to quickly categorize your note for later retrieval.
Features:
• Save URLs, text, and images
• Take notes on saved content
• Add labels to your notes
• Automatically saves to Google Keep
SLIDES GO Free Google slides templates
LOOM Record your screen, voice, and face to create an instantly shareable video
SMALL PDF Easy-to-use PDF tools to Edit, Convert, Merge, Split and Compress PDF files.
FACEBOOK AD LIBRARY Search for any advertiser's campaigns
how to
APPLE: How to record the screen on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch
BUILT VISIBLE: How To Use Talkwalker Alerts for Journalism / PR outreach
NY TIMES: How to use social media in your career.
TFB: How to Make A Shareable Custom Facebook Profile Frame
MAC OBSERVER: How to use How to Use iOS 11 Screen Recording
AMY LANDINO: The Only Video Equipment You Need: This video just might give you the push you need to start incorporating video into your content strategy and marketing. We ordered the mic she recommends.
APPLE SUPPORT How to scan using your iPhone notes app
The Colbrook motel has always embodied dignity safety, respect, and community. redevelopment with better housing coalition honors that legacy through the creation of affordable housing. The green brook built community and b/c builds community
The 9.8-acre site of Bette Housing Coalition's latest Affordable housing Project holds historical significance as the Colbrook Motel was listed in the Green Book, a travel guide for African Americans during segregation. The Colbrook motel has always embodied dignity safety, respect, and community. Better housing coalition honors that legacy through the creation of affordable housing
The parcel is now abandoned and has been a source of blight along the Route 1 corridor.
we broke ground on the site of the historic Colbrook Motel in Chesterfield County, VA—once a safe stop for Black travelers during segregation, and soon to be transformed into 144 affordable apartments.
This $60 million redevelopment honors the past with preserved signage, a history marker, and an on-site gallery, while building a future where everyone has a safe, quality home.
I'm grateful to my friend Patricia for getting me involved int his project.
As Ralph Lauren, founder of his eponymous label, said, “This collection is about more than a charming coastal town; it’s a story of the American dream.”
"What moved me most was not just the aesthetic beauty of the collection, but the integrity behind it. Polo Ralph Lauren didn’t simply borrow from Oak Bluffs’ culture — it partnered with it. It collaborated with the Cottagers, Inc., a group of Black women homeowners who have safeguarded Oak Bluffs’ legacy since 1956. It pledged support to the United Negro College Fund, and produced a companion documentary, “A Portrait of the American Dream: Oak Bluffs,” premiering at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival. The collection tells a story.
The campaign imagery felt like a family reunion: Multigenerational models posed on porches, wrapped in textures that whisper history and resilience. Even the smallest details — buttons, embroidery, hemstitching — felt reverent. As a designer and a daughter of this place, it was emotional to witness.
"As retailers shrink away from diversity, the iconic American brand has taken the opposite route...Ralph Lauren has proved it pays to highlight underrepresented communities and overlooked chapters of American history. The company’s stock has soared nearly 30 percent year-to-date, vastly outpacing the broader market. The S&P 500, tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are all up less than 10 percent this year." -Inc. Magazine
