An integral part of any good design is color selection. If you're anything like me, you troll sites looking for pleasing palettes, maybe you even have ColourLovers bookmarked and make regular visits to the site. However, sometimes a photo can inspire your palette and you want an easier way to save and create the color table from the photo. It can be done quickly with Photoshop in three easy steps.

1. The first step in this process is to convert your photo from RGB color mode to Index Color Mode. Experiment with your own settings but you can use the settings in the image below to start with.

Product designers use foam to mock up products all the time. But it's not the first thing you think of using for UI design. Yet, it was a perfect material for teachers to use to prototype a video player. Add to that a tested method for brainstorming ideas and you can quickly dash (or SCAMPER*) to your next great idea.

Here is the process I used with ten teachers—with widely varying degrees of tech savvy—to create a video player and customize it in the space of a half hour. Why foam? Because it was immediate and non-threatening. The teachers looked at it as a craft project. We started with where they are, not where we want them to be. Taking the tech out of it put them at ease and produced some remarkable results.

1. Each participant was given a bag with a variety of pieces of foam, from an art supply store, in various geometric shapes and colors.

2. To introduce the exercise I asked them not to invent but to reinvent. This is an important idea to emphasize to minimize the fear of creating we all share. Reinvention is the primary means we arrive at a new idea or product. Most ideas are evolutionary, not revolutionary. I began the with the story of the Honorary Chairman of SONY Akio Morita and his idea to combine two devices to create a new entertainment product. SONY engineers had shelved a project that they believe had failed: the smallest possible stereo tape recorder. Chairman Morita saw the potential of this tape player when combined with another new idea—light weight headphones—and the SONY Walkman was born. "This is the product that will satisfy those young people who want to listen to music all day. They'll take it everywhere with them, and they won't care about record functions." The Walkman led to the iPod—and It was easy to find one of those in the room.

There's no doubt about it, one of the most difficult aspects of design is creating an identity. A logo reflects a brand and should inspire trust and recognition. Here are some basic guidelines that I follow when designing new identities:

Start from scratch.
Think of what the logo should represent and resist the temptation to search around on the web for inspiration. Stay far away from the clip art! Taking short cuts results in 'cookie cutter' solutions which lead to ineffective logos. Instead, sketch it out and that weird doodle in the right corner of your notebook could end up being the first mock up of your new logo.

Vector vector vector.
My logos are always designed in Adobe Illustrator. You never know when the logo will need to be scaled for different uses so using a vector-based application allows for a flexible logo design that can be used in numerous print and web-based mediums.

As anyone in PBS Interactive could tell you, I've had a heck of a spring and summer. Lots of projects, short deadlines, running at a million miles an hour... you know how it goes sometimes.

With the last big launch of the crazy times done with, I've had a few days to catch up on all the small items that got left behind (sorry feature images!) and clean up my computer.

I should've taken a screenshot of desktop before I started cleaning, but I have 22" cinematic display and a Macbook Pro 17" and they were both filled to the brim. Also, I have 1200 emails in my inbox (all read), and a folder called "logos_final_FINAL" that I still haven't figured out.

So my order of operations after big launches are:

• Clean up the desktop
  This is a must. I think I'll find a new background too, but making the computer nice and fresh for a new work load is like starting the day after a big breakfast.

• Try to sort email
  Get all the emails for the projects in to the right folders and then try to make sure I haven't missed anything very important. Emails really pile up here at PBS so it's very easy to have items all through the cracks.

• Do not make a new to do list
  I save that for the next day. There is always stuff to do (that's why it's called work), but this final stage is about cleaning and clearing NOT building up again.

Sometimes this can all take a few hours, but as long as nothing urgent is going on, it's 100% worth it. Especially if it's a Friday. It makes Monday morning that much easier to get in to.

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For a design blog, that sure was a boring post wasn't it?

This post was written by our wonderful intern, Annie

As a PBS Interactive intern I've learned quite a bit about the non-profit environment, the media world, and the ice cream flavors at Cold Stone. If I were to do it all over again, here's what I would tell my three-month younger self about the inner workings of 2100 Crystal Drive.

Emil Ruder wrote "To design is to plan, to order, to relate, and to control. In short, it opposes all means of disorder and accident."

I am sure we all agree with that but once you have got that nailed, the very next battle for every designer is to present his/her ideas and concepts in an effective manner so the audience can recognize the benefits and are in agreement with the design.

Here are few tips that could lead your next design critique in an orderly fashion.
(These tips are for an in-house web designer in a corporate setting, planning their Visual Design / IA Design review)

1. Plan your meeting with all the key constituents, who have direct interest in the product you are developing. Also make sure you have all the different stakeholders so you have buy-ins at the same meeting.
2. Send out the meeting request with an agenda plan and name the meeting such as IA Design Review 1.0 - versioning explains the number of rounds each reviews go through
3. Do not send mocks prior to the meeting - play the art of in-person communication to sell your design
4. Interaction Designs are best viewed on the screen - so reduce the waste and plan for projecting your designs in the most common resolution
5. Depending on the size of the project, you should typically plan for one person to lead the presentation and another to take down notes during the meeting (sometimes a Product Manager takes this role as well)
6. Organize the files that you are presenting in a PDF format so you can cycle through without much chaos