This Friday, we’d like to show you how you can use Skitch to create a quick note to send the mother, grandmother, wife, or girlfriend in your life to let her know you’re thinking of her — and not just on Mother’s Day. After all, she should be celebrated every day!

The hardest part of creating the card is picking a photo. Once you’ve taken one with Skitch or you’ve opened another photo you like in Skitch, just use the pen tool or text to write your message for Mom. Skitch’s tools are so simple, you can easily get the kids involved in signing the card, too!

After you’ve added your personal touch to the image, sharing it is a cinch. Just tap the share button in the corner to share a link with her, post it to Facebook or Twitter, or send it in an email. In just a few short minutes, you can create an adorable card that communicates just how much Mom means to you.

If you’re looking for even more ideas to make this Mother’s Day special, check out our tips for planning the Perfect Mother’s Day brunch. How are you using Evernote and Skitch to plan Mother’s Day this year?

Create Your Own Papers

In addition to the Papers available in the Paper Shop, you can also create unique Penultimate papers from any image to fit your note-taking needs. Here’s how it’s done:

1. First, take a photo or scan an image of a blank document you’d like to use as the background of your paper. Then, save it to the Camera Roll on your iPad.
2. Inside any Penultimate Notebook, tap the Papers icon on the top right corner of your screen. Hit the (+) sign, then Continue to add a new Paper.
3. Select the image you’d like to create your Paper from, and name the Paper whatever you would like.
4. Click on your custom Paper to start writing or drawing, just as you normally would. It will now be the default Paper when you create new pages in your current notebook. If you switch Papers or Notebooks and then want to return to the last selection, you can find it in My Papers.

Bonus: To add this paper to Penultimate on your iPad, open the link to this shared note, then tap and hold the .ppr file and tap “Open in Penultimate.”

Any form, diagram, or template that you frequently reference is now synced to all your devices and searchable at a moment’s notice. Custom Papers are a just another way that Penultimate and the rest of Evernote’s apps make getting organized around your projects easy and fun, no matter what information you need to keep track of in your work or daily life.

What kinds of handwritten notes do you take with Penultimate? Share your story in the comments below!

Document any damage

One of the best ways to cover all your bases is with photographic evidence. Snap a photo in Skitch, then mark it up to point out exactly what you’d like the insurance company to notice about the scene.

Keep track of important information

Getting all the information in order surrounding an insurance claim is critical to getting a fair appraisal. Make sure you never lose any important documents by keeping them all in Evernote. Even if you’ve handwritten notes about the incident in a hurry, you can snap a photo and sync it to Evernote so you’ll always have it available.

Map it out

Skitch can help you make a simple, clear map to show where the incident occurred and describe what happened. Just capture the map with Skitch on your mobile device, mark it up, then sync it with Evernote.

Skitch and Evernote are a great team for making sense out of complicated processes. How are you using Skitch and Evernote to capture and keep everything organized? Share your story in the comments below!

Guy Kawasaki, author of APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur.

Kawasaki is the author of twelve books, including The Macintosh Way, his guide to awesome marketing that’s based on his experience being Apple’s chief evangelist.

His most recent book is APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book. It’s an extremely useful how-to guide for writing, editing, and promoting a book in the modern era of self-publishing and e-books. I wish it had been around when I self-published my own book, Pro PR Tips. (See what I did there? Never pass up an opportunity to market your own work. I learned that from Guy.)

In our conversation on Friday, we’ll look into Guy’s toolbox for authors, which includes the way he uses Evernote to organize his work before he begins writing. We’ll also get his advice on preparing a book for publication on the Kindle and other electronic services, and talk about modern marketing (Facebook) and funding options (Kickstarter).

Go to our UStream page to see the event live. If you miss it, it will be available for playback there and also on the Evernote blog.

See you on Friday!

Rafe Needleman is Evernote’s Platform Advocate, and author of Evernote’s Opportunity Notes blog about startups.

Designing Evernote Business:

Launching Evernote Business involved a tremendous amount of work from a large, diverse group of people. We launched the product in a number of languages and across platforms, so we pulled in folks from throughout the company to make using Evernote Business a great experience. Evernote set an ambitious goal to launch the service by the end of 2012, and we all needed to be working together efficiently to pull it off.

Why I used Skitch:

Skitch was an essential part of the process, making it possible to manage the back and forth exchanges we had over product design while keeping us all on the same page. Here’s why it worked so well for us:

It’s fast

Skitch makes grabbing screenshots, annotating them, and sharing them with my team a snap. And because it’s available on every device, I can quickly access my Skitch images even when I’m on the go.

It’s simple

Because Skitch is so intuitive, I can send things to non-designers on the team and they can easily send suggestions back to me. My team doesn’t have to spend time learning how to use complicated tools or writing long emails describing their recommendations – Skitch makes communicating with the group simple and efficient.

It’s clear

Arrows, text, shapes – these all allow me to make my ideas totally clear, which is important when I’m trying to give detailed feedback within the tight product development deadlines we have here at Evernote.

Skitch helped make it happen. Has Skitch helped you to accomplish a big project? Tell us about it in the comments!

Skitch for Wedding Planning

Skitch is great for quickly communicating your ideas with the people who will help you pull it off. Just snap pictures or take screenshots of things you love or want changed, then mark up your images with arrows, shapes, and text to make sure everyone knows exactly what you envision. Share them directly with your fiancé as well as your photographer, cake decorator, florist, or anyone else who will be helping out with your wedding so that everyone is on the same page. Check out the gallery below for ideas on how to use Skitch to make your dream wedding a reality!

Sync your Skitch images. Syncing lets you access them on every device where you have Evernote and edit them on every device you have Skitch. That means you can research hairstyles at home on your computer, then show your hairdresser using your smartphone.

Capture inspiration for invitations with Screen Grab. There are thousands of invitation designs online – use Skitch’s Screen Grab feature to mark up screenshots and point to elements you may want to incorporate in your own invitations.

Capture flower arrangement ideas from your world. If you see a really unique arrangement at a flower shop, at an event, or in a garden, snap a photo of it and point out specifics using Skitch to make them easy to remember later.

Mark up images to customize your dress design. Unless you’re well-versed in fashion or know exactly what you’re looking for, it can be difficult to find the wedding dress of your dreams. Prepare by gathering sample images beforehand from the web or by taking photos of magazines. Then, use Skitch to point out things you’d alter, things you’d keep, or things you can’t stand to help bridal store staff find your perfect dress more quickly.

Plan your decorations and decor. Instead of sending lengthy emails to decorators, use shapes to highlight specific areas where you want decorations placed for just the right effect.

Have you used Skitch to plan a wedding or other big event? Share your story in the comments below!

Bio

Parker Holcomb, an entrepreneur and longtime Evernote user, shares some ways that Evernote and Skitch help him grow and run his storage and shipping business, All College Storage, as well as develop his newest company and app, eHighLighter.

Parker’s Quick Tip: Note links nested in a checklist can help you stay on top of the more detailed tasks or processes in your life by creating a quick and easy information hierarchy. Check out my GTD system with nested Note Links below!

I Use Skitch and Evernote for…

Running My Business

I use both Evernote and Skitch religiously to help me manage everything about All College Storage. From training new employees in business operations to shared task management, the apps are a key component in keeping me connected to my employees and in managing the work that needs to be done. Here  are some examples of the ways I use Evernote and Skitch to be more productive at All College Storage.

Evernote for Task Management

The company’s slogan is “student run, professionally done,” which means I depend on my 16 student employees (called Campus Presidents) to help manage the business on the ground and provide great customer service. I use Evernote Shared Notebooks to help them stay on track with the company’s goals while managing a lot of the day-to-day operations independently. This gives them the ability to “own” their campus presence and share in the entrepreneurial experience, while allowing me to keep track of important milestones.

To manage all of this, I’ve started a central GTD system which includes a checklist of everything that needs to be completed, organized by type of task and priority. I use Note Links for each item in the checklist to connect to more information and notes about each individual task and to help me manage the completion of tasks. For example, each school we service appears as a Note Link, and clicking on it reveals a shared note with a more detailed list of tasks that my Campus President will check off when they finish.

Because Evernote is available for almost every device, my employees can access this information whether they are at their desk or on the ground organizing a pack, which makes me feel confident that I am always up to date with what’s happening in my business at any given time.

Skitch for Training

Even though I share a lot of documents from my account with my employees to help them learn different parts of the business, it’s often much easier for me to share detailed information with a simple Skitch image. For this reason, Skitch has become central to my training process. From the back-end of our payment system to the packing map for a given school, it’s much faster and simpler to show my Campus Presidents what I mean by adding shapes, arrows, and text to communicate the information visually with Skitch.

Skitch makes it easy for me to create materials that Campus Presidents can use to teach others our system. This is really helpful in scaling my business, as they need to bring on a lot of contract laborers and train them in best practices for packing and organizing the trucks. By simply sharing a couple of Skitch images that detail how our system works, my Campus Presidents have the tools they need to get their contractors up to speed in no time.

Developing my App

In addition to my work managing ACS, I’m developing eHighLighter, a personal research assistant app that integrates with Evernote and brings eBook benefits to paper sources. It’s now available in the Trunk! With it, you can take a picture of a book, then highlight and transcribe the text in the image to create searchable annotations and citations. These tools make organizing research a breeze.

Skitch for Sharing Ideas

Throughout the process of building eHighLighter, Skitch has been really useful in communications with my developer. If it weren’t for Skitch, describing what I want certain buttons to accomplish or mapping out idea flows would require sending dozens of emails back and forth. With Skitch, I only need to mark up an image of the home screen with text and arrows, drop the image into an email. Building an app requires a lot of work, but annotating with Skitch has made the process much more efficient than it would have been otherwise.

Evernote for Organizing Large Projects

Evernote also plays a critical role in helping me manage the development process. All the information I need to make sure I don’t stray too far from the development roadmap is easy for the whole team to access in a Shared Notebook, where I save feature summaries so that we have concrete goals for each version and we never miss out on any key pieces. It’s also helpful to share idea flows and organize my thinking around different features, and because I can access it from anywhere, whenever an idea strikes me, I can immediately capture it and share it with my team.

How are you using Evernote and Skitch to help manage and build your business? Leave your comments below!

For eleven months out of the year, people love to hate on snail mail (or, as I like to call it, “Mail Classic”). Come December though, people begin to enjoy having their mailboxes stuffed with holiday cheer in the form of catalogs, cards, and yes, even the Family Letter. Loved by some and reviled by others, the Family Letter is the fruitcake of holiday mail. I say, if you’re going to distribute a letter that chronicles the last 12 months of your family’s life (whether via snail mail or email, as it’s getting close to that time!), it’s your duty to write responsibly— keep the bragging to a minimum, keep it short, and please, pleeease, make it halfway interesting.

That’s where Evernote comes in. There are so many tips and tricks I use to help me collect great memories I can tap into when it comes time to write my end-of-year declaration. Here are some tips on how to use Evernote to make your Family Letter shine.

• DON’T: Include a 365 day play-by-play. A lot happens in a year…where to start? Go for highlights. Scan your family’s Tweets, blog posts, Facebook, or Google Plus status updates, using Evernote to capture the best ones which you can mine for newsletter fodder. You could begin now (or start prep for next year) by using a service like IFTTT or Zapier to auto-publish an RSS feed to an Evernote notebook, automatically putting all those updates in one place.
• DO: Add telling visuals. When you capture pictures with Evernote’s iPhone app, each pic automatically gets a geo-location label as well as time and date stamp, so you won’t find yourself wondering when exactly it was that your tiny dancer had her first ballet recital, where that family hike was, or the exact day someone passed his driver’s test. This will also make things easy on you when you want to put events in chronological order.
• DON’T stop at family photos. Concert tickets, hotel matchbooks — they all represent special  memories and create a bit more variety than yet another picture of you and the kids mugging to the camera.
• DON’T: Weigh down your letter with bad news. If you feel it’s important to let people know about some of the less fortunate things that happened over the year, that’s fine. Just keep it brief and consider countering it with positive news like how far you’ve come with your goals. Just look back on your progress-related notes (maybe you’ve been working on fitness, saving, or job goals) and see how far you’ve come.
• DO: Include other voices. One route you might take? Ask each family member to contribute a short anecdote (5 sentences or so). You could have them contribute voice recordings or written notes to a Shared Notebook so they’re easy to collect and collate for the newsletter.
• DON’T: Write a novel. Break things up into short paragraphs (this is easier to read), and try to keep your updates to a page, two pages max. Seriously, if your Family Letter reads more like a chapter book, you probably want to do a serious edit.
• DO: Let inspiration strike. Once you begin brainstorming, you’ll find memories pop up in the most unlikely of places. Use one of Evernote’s mobile apps to make an audio note on-the-go that you can incorporate later.

What say you: Should family letters still exist?  And if so, what’s your best tip for writing one?

Take the Evernote Holiday Pledge

From now through the New Year, you can sign up for the Evernote Holiday Pledge and opt in to receive email tips and guidance from the Evernote team and our Ambassadors about ways you can get more out of Evernote. Participate in virtual events like the Evernote  & Chronicle Books Craft-Along and join our public notebook, which is updated regularly with fresh tips and guides. Stay tuned for new tips and challenges to help you start the new year right.

A few of the useful things you’ll find in our public notebook:

Save the Evernote Holiday Guide to your Evernote account >>>

See how you can create a holiday budget with Evernote >>>

• Name: Alexandra Samuel
• Evernote Ambassador: Research
• Location: Vancouver, BC
• Profession: Vice President of Social Media,
  Vision Critical
• Website: http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/
• Twitter: @awsamuel
  

Today we’re introducing a new Ambassador who’s here to help you better use Evernote for research, whether you’re a working professional or in school. Alexandra Samuel is Vice President of Social Media at Vision Critical, a market research technology provider and the author of Work Smarter with Evernote (Harvard Business Review Press, December 2012). She blogs for Harvard Business Review. Today, she’s sharing her top tips for using Evernote to get more from your research. Please welcome Alexandra!

Meet Alexandra >>>

Whether your work week involves gathering competitive intelligence, writing white papers or planning business trips, the odds are good that research is part of what gets the job done. So if you can become more effective at finding, organizing, absorbing and retrieving your research materials, you’ll be more effective in your job.

That’s where Evernote comes in. As more and more of our jobs involve a significant research element, and as the volume of material available online tempts us into surveying and assimilating ever-larger collections of material, research capacity is a major factor in professional success. But even those of us with formal research training were likely trained in the pre-social media, or even the pre-Internet era: we’ve had to assemble and refine our own practices, toolkits and tricks for effective online research. Using Evernote as the foundation of your online research toolkit can help you master the art of research, and ensure that the fruits of your research labors are always at your fingertips.

I’ve had a chance to refine my own use of Evernote as a research tool in the course of writing Work Smarter with Evernote, released by Harvard Business Review Press today. The strategies I use can help you become a better researcher — and a more successful professional — in 2013. Here are some of the key elements in my toolkit:

Web Clipper: The Evernote Web Clipper is the workhorse of your researching life. Install it in every browser you use, including on your smartphone or tablet. (Here’s how to do that on an iPhone or iPad and on Android). Use it to clip articles and background reading on your client projects, quotations you want to incorporate (and properly cite) in a paper or compile reviews and recommendations for a vacation or shopping trip.

PDF to Evernote: If you download or receive a lot of research reports in PDF form, you may find yourself desperate for something better than a desktop folder full of individual PDF files. Drag those PDFs into Evernote and you can organize them into notebooks (for example, a notebook full of your competitors’ annual reports) or tag them with keywords that will make them easy to find. If you subscribe to Evernote Premium, you’ll also be able to search the full text of all those PDFs from within Evernote.

Paper: Oh, paper. I’d love to think Evernote could make it all just go away already, but there are moments when even the most geeked out researcher will find herself reaching for actual ink-on-dead-trees. Happily, Evernote can make your POFP (plain old-fashioned paper) notes more useful, if you take the time to snap (and ideally tag) them. Whether you’ve scribbled some notes in the margin of a book you’re annotating or diagramming the outline for a research paper on a flip chart, take a snapshot from within Evernote and you’ll be able to find those notes anytime you need them, simply by searching for a distinctive keyword you remember from the text. Thanks to its built-in optical character recognition (OCR), Evernote can even read your lousy handwriting.

Offline Notebooks: If you’re compiling research resources that you’ll need to refer to in the course of your daily work (like tech how-tos) or while on the road (like restaurant recommendations for a city you’re visiting) you may find them most useful if they’re quickly accessible while offline. Set these notebooks as Offline Notebooks in Evernote on your smartphone or tablet, and you’ll be able to quickly pull them up, even if you’re away from an Internet connection.

Interview notes: Heretical though it may sound in the age of Google, your best source of knowledge is often your fellow human beings. You know, actual people you sit down with and ask stuff. The problem is that human beings are not full text searchable…which is where Evernote comes in. Record your interviews, stash the audio recordings in Evernote, and add your written notes or transcript to the same note. (If you took your written notes by hand, snap them and drag the image into the same note as your audio file). Tag the interview with the subject name, topic, keywords covered and (crucial!) the tag “interview.” Now, you’ll never have trouble finding or referencing your interviews, and you’ll have them all findable in a single place — under that “interview” tag.

Tags: If you’re working with a large volume of research notes or resources in order to develop a document or deliverable, you will likely need to organize all that material with some sort of taxonomy. You can keep all related notes in one big notebook (like “Acme White Paper), and use tagging to organize those materials into subcategories. If you’re doing interdisciplinary work, you might use tags that distinguish between materials from different fields (like “organizational behavior” and “social psychology”), or if you’re categorizing an eclectic set of case studies you might tag them with industry or country names. Since you can assign multiple tags to any one note, you don’t have to choose between different taxonomy structures: tag your materials with the field name, country and industry and you can see which insights emerge from viewing your notebooks through different lenses.

Archives: When you’ve gone to the trouble of compiling the ultimate set of clips on motorcycle trips through Argentina, it can be pretty tough to toss those clips in the trash — even if you never expect to rent another motor bike in Buenos Aires. At the same time, you don’t want that notebook cluttering up your Evernote sidebar. My favourite way to archive a completed research project is to stash my now-deprecated notebook in a notebook stack I’ve titled “Z:Archive” (I use the Z so that it gets pushed to the bottom of my sidebar by default). I actually have multiple Z:Archive stacks, with titles like Z:Archive Travel and Z:Archive Household. If you’re getting close to your 250-notebook limit, you can create a single Archive notebook, and put all your deprecated notes in there: before moving a notebook like Argentina Motorcycle into your archive notebook, select all the notes in the notebook and tag them Argentina Motorcycle Notebook. Then if you ever want to re-create your notebook, it’s simply a matter of selecting all notes with that tag, and dragging them into a new notebook.

Sharing: If you’ve done your homework on a personal or professional challenge, the chances are good that your homework can be helpful to someone else. Sharing a notebook full of your Web clips and research notes — either as a Public Notebook, or a notebook that you invite specific colleagues to share — can be a terrific way to make your work useful to others, and can also showcase your own professional expertise. For example, a market researcher might create a “data highlights” notebook to share key survey results with colleagues who could use data snippets or charts in their own presentations and reports.

ReadThis: There’s one thing that all the careful clipping, filing and organizing can’t do for you as a researcher: get all the results of that research into your head. Until we get those Matrix-style jacks in our heads, we’re still stuck with the need to actually read, watch or listen to the stuff we have dug up and now want to know about. That’s why I use the tag “ReadThis” for all the bits of background reading I find and compile but fear I’ll never get to. When I have a few spare minutes between meetings or on the bus, I’ve always got something that I specifically want to read, so I can use the time to catch up. If I expect to have a chunk of offline time available for reading — typically on an airplane — I drag the latest ReadThis items into an empty notebook and make sure to sync it to my iPad as an Offline Notebook before I get on the plane.

Of course, it’s in the nature of research that you always want to find new and smarter ways to do that work: it’s that hunger for knowledge and improvement that drives the research process. As you refine your own research process so that you can work smarter in 2013, make sure to create a notebook or tag that you use to gather, read and recall the very best strategies for using Evernote itself.

The Evernote Ambassador Program

Evernote Ambassadors are amazing individuals that are here to teach, share and help you get more out of Evernote. Learn more about Ambassadors and consider submitting your story.

Join the conversation happening in our Lifestyle Forum to connect with Ambassadors and other Evernote users.

Join the conversation

Download Ambassador Guides

Drag and drop them into a New Note or attach them to a note so you can access them from any computer or mobile device where you have Evernote installed!

Daniel Hedrick’s Holiday Photography Tips
Joshua Zerkel’s Productivity Tips (PDF)
Brandie Kajino’s Organization Tips (PDF)
Carley Knobloch’s Spring Cleaning Tips (PDF)
Jamie Todd Rubin’s Paperless Tips (PDF)
Jenni Lathrop’s Crafting Tips (PDF)
Lindsey Holmes’ Small Business Tips (PDF)
Krisstina Wise’s Real Estate Tips (PDF)
Rob van Nood’s case study on Evernote for Portfolios (PDF)

Take the Evernote Holiday Pledge

From now through the New Year, you can sign up for the Evernote Holiday Pledge and opt in to receive email tips and guidance from the Evernote team and our Ambassadors about ways you can get more out of Evernote. Participate in virtual events like the Evernote  & Chronicle Books Craft-Along and join our public notebook, which is updated regularly with fresh tips and guides.

Trunk Apps for the Holidays: Something For Everyone
Check out our selection of apps that work with Evernote to help you get more organized this holiday season. Learn more about holiday Trunk apps.

Brazil: A Hotbed of Tech Innovation and Setting of our Latest Hackathon
Read about our experience hosting a hackathon in Brazil, and check out the app that won first prize. See what makes Brazil a destination for technological innovation.

Trunk Spotlight: Dispatch Simplifies Teamwork with Evernote
A cool new integration that lets you create threaded conversations around your Evernote notes. Find out more about Dispatch.

Quick Tip Friday: How to Join a Public Notebook
Get more out of Public Notebooks by adding them to your Evernote account. Get the Quick Tip.

Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome Gets New Related Results Features
Related Results help you discover more useful content in your Evernote account. Learn about new features in the Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome.

Evernote for Mac Updated With New Premium Related Notes and Usability Improvements
Related Notes in Evernote for Mac allow you to rediscover relevant content related to the notes you’re viewing and creating. Check out what else is new and improved in Evernote for Mac.

This Week in Opportunity Notes

• You Lost Me at “Hello”: Two apps that improve the old signaling and communicating interaction.
• Hand-me-down Mode: Lots of kids are inheriting devices when the alpha geeks in their families upgrade, and there’s a big opportunity there for hardware manufacturers.
• Crosswa.lk Augments the App Store: An app that makes it easier to get apps installed on your iPhone or other iOS devices.