Sharing best practices via pictures

In days of yore, if you visited any design shop, you'd see scores of printouts, sketches, and other design work tacked and taped on walls throughout. In fact, in our design teams at Cisco we still do a lot of this today to inspire each other and share ideas.

And, Web design teams use this same technique to capture inspiration that they may have seen on other great Web sites.

But what happens when you really want to share an idea, and folks are located around the globe rather than down the hall or in the cube next door?

There's a pretty easy electronic way to do the same thing, and we've been using it for a while to share screen shots of inspiring things on the Web.

We set up a private and restricted account on Flickr, the photosharing site, with an associated email address. You can too. Then, anyone on your team can share pictures and notes, like so:

1. Grab a screenshot of something interesting you see (say, using an app like SnagIt)
   
2. Create an email:
   
   
   
   • Address the email to the address you set up with Flickr.
     
   • Paste the screenshot into an email compose window (or attach it as a file)
     
   • The image title is defined by the email subject.
     
   • The image description is based on the email body.
     
   • To add keyword tags, include a line in the body that begins with "tags: ", followed by each tag separated by spaces.
     
   
   
3. Send it
   

Now, everyone on your team can see your great ideas.

Here's an example of what the resulting gallery looks like:



Enjoy!

Posted by Martin Hardee at 05:45AM PST

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