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The easiest way for designers to send email newsletters for themselves and their clients.

Tools we use: Skitch

Posted by Mathew Patterson on June 19, 2008 1:36 PM

In the last "tools we use" post, I mentioned the excellent HelpSpot application, which we use for all our support. Today's featured tool is also used in support, but in a slightly different way.

Even though Campaign Monitor and MailBuild are both pretty straight forward, there is times when we need to explain how to do something specific, or where to find something.

Some of those questions are answered by the narrated videos, but others are one off or less broad. In those cases, I love to use Skitch. Skitch is a tool from Plasq, the awesome Mac developers also responsible for Comic Life. They are so smart they even use Campaign Monitor for some of their newsletters!

Plasq have a tagline for Skitch - "Snap, Draw, Share!" - which is pretty descriptive. You load Skitch, and take a quick snap of any part of your screen, draw over the top of it, and then you can automagically make it publicly or privately shared.

I love to use Skitch to make super quick screengrabs of different parts of Campaign Monitor and MailBuild, annotating the image to show where a setting is or where to click. I've got a folder setup on the Campaign Monitor site, and Skitch can automatically upload the image and give me back a URL for it, which I can paste into my HelpSpot response.

It will do timed screenshots too, which is helpful when showing drop downs like in the screenshot above. Skitch literally saves minutes of faffing about taking screenshots, editing sizes, uploading in FTP clients and so on, every single time I use it.

A clear screenshot can also save a lot of back and forth with customers when trying to explain in text something that can be understand visually much more easily. I highly recommend you try out Skitch yourself. You can signup for the public beta right now at no cost.

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