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Perhaps this story sounds familiar: Your organization began with a handful of people, and as you grew you recognized the need for a website to market your product or service. Because you didn’t have a lot of funding, you commissioned someone with a little tech know-how to create your site, using Dreamweaver. He or she did a decent job--not world-class design or anything--but decent. Great! You had a website and were getting visitors.

Twitter, the ever-growing social media bohemoth that allows you to update the world on what you're doing, recently launched a new feature called Lists. Lists allow any Twitter user to create a list of Twitter users. Think of it as giving a person within a directory the ability to a create his or her own sub-directory and share it with the entire directory.

When I see new features like Lists, I always ask, "How can this apply to our clients--great causes--who are always looking for new ways to connect people to their organization's mission?" If you are your organization's social media guru, here are a few ways to consider making use of Twitter Lists.

It used to be that when great causes called HiDef to seek advice, the question would be, "I just bought this domain name; what should my website look like?" I would salivate while beautiful web design and development scenarios materialized--site architecture, page layouts and workflows that would allow the client's audience to connect to their product or service.

Icon design is a fascinating niche that requires its own bag of tricks and techniques. One popular technique I've been seeing around lately is a perforated metal texture. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch take a look at the Settings icon. If you look closely you will see a very subtle but wonderful perforated metal background. Textures such as this add a level of polish and detail that can set your icons apart and can help make you a leading icon designer. Today I'll walk you through how this texture is created using simple shapes, basic gradients and easy to master transformations.

Final Image Preview

This is final image that we will be creating. Download the final Illustrator file.