Resources. Leather bound book with green apple.

Its time for a new icon contest! Tell me what you want me to design for you! If you could pick one icon, that you’d have an enormous use of, what would it be?

I’m going to design a new collection of beautiful and handy icons. There will be around ten icons in the set, based on the ideas of the winners who’ll get the collection for free!

This time the theme is taking care of business, whether it’s the administrative aspect of your life such as filing taxes, planning your next vacation, dealing with your budget or running a small business, it makes it much more fun and easy when you can locate what you need with ease! Adding beauty to your digital space will make these tasks more enjoyable too.

As an example, this icon of a leather bound book and a green apple with dew from the Organizer Collection is an icon symbol for “resources”, but it would also work for “to read”, “legal”, “stash”, “research”, “reference”, “writing”, “book”, “learning”, “teaching”, “nutrition”, “tutorials” or anything else you feel that it represents.

Which files and projects do you need to find with ease? What kind of files and folders do you create on a regular basis? What do your most important and favourite projects look like? It might be an icon that’s a metaphor for documents that need printing, receipts from online purchases or sales, travel expenses, itineraries, art and crafting supplies, invoices, marketing materials, there are endless possibilities! You can enter the competition with one idea for an icon and one idea for the name of the set.

I’d love to hear if you have more ideas or thoughts around the project, but to make it fair to everyone, your main idea will be the one that you can enter the competition with.

The deadline for the icon contest is in two weeks, Friday 19th of March. So take the chance to influence this collection of icons with your ideas and thoughts and needs. Win the icons you really, really want! Please comment to enter the competition.

Tags: getting organized, Icons, organize, productive, productivity

I just sent out the winter issue of limited edition desktop goodies exclusively for members of Club Marmalade Moon. This time I made an assortment of festive ribboned holiday gifts in the same style as the collections of Productive Icons.

Five presents in silver, green, red, white and gold to put your desktop in the holiday spirit. These icons come in very handy if you’re giving someone a digital present. I also adapted the holiday gift design into a desktop wallpaper.

Not quite sure how to customize your digital environment? Check out the Help Desk where there are tutorials both for Windows and Mac. It’s easy and quick! Then join the Club for limited edition desktop art. What are you waiting for?  It’s fun and free!

Happy Holidays! Merry Desktop!

Desktop Holiday Gifts

Tags: Christmas, Club Marmalade Moon, desktop wallpaper, gifts, Icons, presents, winter

Cupcakes of Happiness by Susannah Conway

Aren’t they delightful, these Cupcakes of Happiness by photographer Susannah Conway of Ink on my fingers?! Simply irresistible!

I love how grey brings elegance and sophistication to pink and was inspired to design a set of pink cupcake icons with a matching cupcake desktop wallpaper. Strawberry, violet, raspberry, orchid and cherries.

This delicious, limited edition desktop art is available for members of Club Marmalade Moon, so join the club if you haven’t already!

Pink cupcake icons

Wallpaper with pink cupcakes.

Tags: Club Marmalade Moon, cupcakes, desktop wallpaper, Icons, pink

Emoji (絵文字) is the Japanese term for the picture characters or emoticons used in Japanese wireless messages and webpages. Originally meaning pictograph, the word literally means e “picture” + moji “letter”. — Wikipedia

Aren’t these little emoticons simply adorable!? The good news is, that you can use them on your Mac and on your iPhone or iPod touch. You just have to activate them.

There Several Applications That Activate Emoji Icons

To activate Emoji icons, I installed Spell Number, a free utility that helps users write out numbers as in cheque writing protection and turns on Emoji icons.

There are several 99¢ Emoji enabler applications (link to App Store) in the App Store that enable Emoji icons on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Remember, Emoji only works from iPhone to iPhone.

Most of these applications simply enable Emoji icons, but there are some apps that offer a bit more functionality.

Typing Genius (link to App Store) is also a touch typing trainer.

XEmoji (link to App Store) gives you a description of each icon as well as the hex code.

Activating Emoji Icons On Your iPhone or iPod Touch

Once you have picked an application that turns on Emoji icons, follow these steps.

1. Use the application for a short while to start the process. (If you are using Spell Number, here is a link to the Easter Egg code, enter the code.) Exit the application.
2. Go to Settings > General > International > Keyboards > Japanese. Turn on Emoji.
3. To use the Emoji keyboard in Mail, SMS, Notes or any other application, tap on the World/Globe key next to the space bar on your iPhone or iPod Touch keyboard.
4. The Emoji keyboard has several tabs for the different categories of icons. Scroll sideways for more icons.

How To Activate Emoji Icons For iChat

Finally, if you want to turn on Emoji icons for instant messaging in iChat, you can download Emoji for iChat by Einar Andersson & Tor Rauden Källstigen.

Tags: Emoji, emoticons, Icons, instant messenger, iPhone, iPod Touch, Japan, Mac OS X