Productivity Archives - Houdini Interactive

Category: Productivity

January 27, 2025

The Top 7 Keyboard Shortcuts for Digital Producers to Change Your Life

In this age of AI, everyone is talking about how to save time and all the efficiencies you get. Sure, there are amazing prompts and tricks to get the best output to plus up sooo many of our day-to-day tasks, but there are efficiencies you can be gaining without any AI or additional programs. We can’t tell you how many times we watch over peoples’ shoulders as they are walking through their work, and it is painful to watch as they navigate and…..use their mouse.

Just like the title, here are 5 keyboard shortcuts that we use on the regular that are going to be your best friends, and they will save you more time than you could ever image.

Some ground rules – we are Mac users, so we’re going to be referencing Mac shortcuts first, and then have the Windows Versions listed after. We’ll do our best to clarify which programs these shortcuts are the most effective in. Play around with the shortcuts in different programs – you’ll be surprised how global some of them are.

Keyboard Shortcut #1: CMD + Tab ( CMD + Shift + Tab : Backwords)

While holding the CMD button, hit the Tab button and then release.
This shortcut will bounce you back/forth between the last two programs you were using. This works great when on a single monitor (just your laptop), or even between a multi-screen setup.
Bonus tip – if you hold the CMD button while tapping the Tab button, you will see a toolbar that shows all open programs, and each press of the Tab button will change the highlighted program as it cycles through. Simply release the CMD button when the program you desire is highlighted.
Windows version: Windows + Tab

Keyboard Shortcut #2: CMD + ~ (With Shift: CMD + ~ : Backwards)

This shortcut is similar in spirit to the CMD + Tab shortcut in that it switches you between windows….of the same program!
I use this regularly in Chrome – I’ll have multiple windows of Chrome open that have groups of relevant tabs in each window (there are great Chrome features where you can even organize or pin tabs!). CMD + ~ very quickly allows me to cycle through the different Chrome windows to access the information I need without ever needing to use my mouse.
Windows Version: Windows + ~

Keyboard Shortcut #3: CMD + K

In G-Suite, this shortcut is the hyperlink function. So, you either can use keyboard functions to highlight the text you need, or you use your mouse and hold CMD and then press the K button. This will open the hyperlink text entry.
This same shortcut in Slack is how you can access the directory text box to quickly type in the channel name or person’s name you want to message or review. Slack did a great job with this feature because any channel or DM that has unread messages will show up at the top of the list without entering anything into the text field, and all you need to do is either hit Return to start at the top, or down/up arrow to the one you want and hit Return.
Windows Version: CTRL + K

Keyboard Shortcut #4: CMD + W

This works on a system level, and can act differently for different programs.
Let’s start with Chrome – want to X out of a tab? That is what CMD + W does for you. When in a tab that you are done with, you hold the CMD button and then press the W button and it will kill the chrome tab you are in. Super amazing.
- This is especially awesome for those of us who have 10 gazillion tabs in each window, and selecting the X with the mouse can require brutal precision when you are in the flow.
General programs – CMD + W will kill the window you have open. For example, I’ll sometimes have multiple PDFs open in Preview. When I’m done with one, just hit the CMD + W shortcut, and it closes only that window out and pulls the next recent Preview window up. Snip snap!
Windows Version: CTRL + W

Keyboard Shortcut #5: CMD + Shift + 8

This shortcut applies to many programs. The programs I use this the most in are G-Suite, Slack, email, Asana.
This combo is the shortcut to create a bulleted list. There are some fun additional shortcuts to keep in mind with this:
- CMD + Shit + 7 can switch it to a numbered/ordered list, and this can be mixed/matched with the bulleted list. For example, maybe you want to start the top bullet as just a bullet, but you want to have the sub-bullets list as (a), (b), etc, you can do that with this combo.
- CMD + Shift + 8 within a bulleted list will remove the bullet and take the line to the beginning of the indented area (in continuity of whatever sub-bullet you are at).
- CMD + ] will indent the bullet your text marker is on (Tab may be the only option in some programs)
- CMD + [ will un-indent the bullet your text marker is on
- These two will be clutch as you are taking notes and really getting into the sub-bullets.
Windows Versions:
- CTRL + Shift + 7
- CTRL + Shift + 8
- CTRL + ]
- CTRL + [

Keyboard Shortcut #6: Shift + d-arrows

This one is going to actually be a grouping, because they all play around the same function. This is generally an OS level keyboard shortcut, but it may play differently in some programs. The descriptions below are geared towards the G-Suite, Slack and Asana.
Shift + d-arrows will highlight/unhighlight text. For example, if your text indicator is at the beginning of a line of text, and you hold Shift will hitting the Right Arrow, this will highlight a letter at a time. Pay attention to the following list, as this is where things get wild:
- CMD + Shift + Right Arrow will highlight from your text indicator to the end of the line
- This will also work in reverse – from the end of the line to the beginning of the line with the Left Arrow
- Option + Shift + Right Arrow will highlight a word at a time, as well as special characters when paired with words/numbers, per tap of the Right Arrow.
- Similarly, Option + Delete will delete a word at a time, and a special character at a time when they are paired with words/numbers.
- CMD + d-arrows will take your text indicator to the end/beginning of a line if you use the Right Arrow/Left Arrow respectively.
- CMD + Delete will delete from the text indicator to the beginning of a line.
Windows Versions:
- Shift + d-arrows
- CTRL + Shift + d-arrows
- CTRL + Backspace

Keyboard Shortcut #7: CMD + Z (perhaps one of the most famous keyboard shortcuts)

This one is going to actually be a grouping, because they all play around the same function. Maybe even the Holy Trinity of Keyboard Shortcuts…
CMD + Z is the UNdo function. Every time you hit it is executes one step back of the Undo.
CMD + Shift + Z is the REdo function. If you have gone too many “undo’s” back, this will take you forward.
In the spirit of “undo’ing”, CMD + Shift + T in Chrome will re-open a Chrome tab or window that you may have inadvertently closed. I can’t tell you how many times this has saved me. You’re welcome.
Windows Versions:
- CTRL + Z
- CTRL + Shift + Z
- CTRL + Shift + T

There you have it. These will make your life as a producer even more efficient. Have fun with them, play around with some of the combinations, and who knows what you’ll discover.

What are your favorite Keyboard Shortcuts? Let us know which have made the biggest difference for you.

Penn Brownlee

January 27, 2025

5 Best Ways to Get Ahead of Your Next Interactive Web Experience Project

While we work with a lot of very experienced teams around the world on digital experiences, activations and web-experiences, we work with just as many teams who aren’t regularly doing digital. For those clients, it can be daunting, and there is a lot of information out there that may or may not apply to you and your current situation for B2B and experiential marketing (and plenty of other scenarios, really). Here are 5 regularly consistent points that come up that can save a lot of time, heart-ache, and can seem like a magic wand waving over a project to get it to the finish line efficiently.

The Top 5 Things to Have Prepared

1 of 5: Privacy Policy / Terms & Conditions / Cookie Policy – “The Legalese,” as they say

Ensuring you have your legalese i’s crossed and t’s dotted is about the easiest thing you can get the ball rolling on early, and stay ahead of launching your website or experience. It is way more exciting to see your designs coming together, and playing around with the staging link and doing QA – it just feels like you are making progress and checking off tasks left and right.
But once we get right to the finish line, and the Privacy Policy isn’t ready, or the Terms & Conditions aren’t there, or a fully approved Cookie Policy isn’t sourced (assuming we aren’t the ones providing that), everything comes to a screeching halt and those seatbelts engage in full force. Youch!
So, as soon as you know you are doing a website, whether it is a simple landing page, a small interactive, a web AR experience, start getting these 3 things in motion and approved so that once QA is all done and the kit and kaboodle is ready to launch, you get to roll right into that launch and start cheersing some butter beer.

2 of 5: The Right People in the Room

Nothing is more disappointing than working on an activation that is ready to go live and have some stakeholder who was not included come in and shut the whole thing down, or introduce nearly insurmountable hurdles in the final hour. Sadly, this happens despite our best efforts to avoid this, even after establishing processes to hedge against this.
Some questions to ask as you get into a digital project or activation to help grease the wheels:
- Who from the IT team do we need to include in this discussion/project during production to make this as smooth as possible?
- Who has the veto authority over this project and any of its deliverables? How can we include them at the right times?
- Is this the kind of project that the legal team needs to review? If yes, then get a debrief meeting set asap and get the guardrails defined.
- Who from the Brand Management team needs to be included, or the Creative Directors who will have final say on look/feel? They need to be included at the outset of any interactive experience.

3 of 5: Brand Guides and Approved Assets (and the right file types!)

This is one of the first questions we ask when collaborating with an existing brand/IP/company when we are engaged to design an experience. True to having the right people in the room, if we aren’t starting with the right material, things get derailed and potentially shut down.
Every now and again, we encounter a brand/company that doesn’t have a fully fleshed out Brand Guide, or even a curated library of assets that is central to an organization. In these scenarios, lots of questions and check-ins with the Right People in the Room helps to smooth over any potential hangups this can introduce.
Similar to the Brand Guide, what are the approved assets that can be used, or the content that will be implemented into an experience? Who owns them, and are they in a sharable location with our team? This conversation can get started even before signing an SOW with us, and can be refined during a kickoff call so that any and all assets that could be used are prepped and ready for us to run with by the time we get to design.
Now, the prep part of approved assets is potentially a much longer conversation, but a few quickies to pre-heat the cauldron:
- In the digital world, we are often trying to work with the largest versions possible, and then we can scale them down. Like a haircut, you can always take hair away, you can’t add it back.
- Vector art is what we prefer for brand assets.
- Powerpoint is not a design file…
- Videos can be compressed/optimized on our end, but it is always helpful if they are compressed for us prior to implementation.

4 of 5: Necessary Access for Integrations

Almost all the web experiences we build have some degree of 3rd party integrations. Whether it is analytics through our partner’s/client’s accounts, CRM integration, or a career embed, we often need to have access to the platforms we are integrating to effectively implement and then test.
For our much larger clients, they have procedures that need to followed to allow either the proper access or the proper permissions to be able to set up the integrations, i.e. API integrations.
One workaround for this for some integrations is to set them up for our clients and pass them over/migrate them to our clients upon launch. That said, the note about procedures/permissions applies, and this approach can’t work for the majority of the integrations we work with.

5 of 5: PII – Who’s Responsible

We work in a lot of different industries, and one thing that is consistent across all industries is respecting PII and everything associated with it. For example, there have been quite a few pharmaceutical projects we have worked on where they strictly do not collect any contact information.

Penn Brownlee

November 22, 2024

The Unthinkable Reality of Not Going Viral

🐕 Guys, believe when I say this, my dog is the cutest. Really.

Last year, I posted this absolute banger of a Reel thinking it was going to go viral instantaneously. I even made my profile public. I even included #hashtags. A thousand views, a hundred likes and a dozen shares later, I thought: that’s it? Just like anything we think is really great, it’s not up to us to define ‘great’ for others.

🎅🏻 There’s an estimated 350,000 Santa Claus imposters…I mean impersonators.

I genuinely was a little disappointed I didn’t achieve some flash in the pan fame because of this cut, it was like thinking I’d actually sat on Santa’s lap just to find out…nah. But the more I think about it, the more honest I start to get with myself:

The Santa Claus Network boasts some 10,000 members.
Some 30,000 Santa’s run in the San Diego Santa Run every year alone.
2009 apparently was peak time for Santa imposters, at an estimated 350,000.
But Loma isn’t a Santa Claus, she’s a Golden Retriever Santa Paws. She has to stand out, how many can there be?

🧑🏻🤝🧑🏼 You’ve got something in your eye.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” as they say. Those adages sure have a way of being applicable in just about every aspect of our lives. Not long ago, I came across a post from a guy I have met, collaborated with, know well enough to say hi if we’re in adjacent urinals and highly respect his view of the world around him.

He pumped out this great article after Tik-Tok took down a viral video he posted. This line had me feenin’: There will come a success that will threaten to derail you.

🐻 The bear you must wrestle.

The greatest work that I’m currently doing is the work happening in me. In the agency world, it’s easy to forget that we are one of 350,000 Santas at any one time. There’s a lot of us, doing great work, pumping out great ideas. But we’re killin’ it. Proof is in the pudding. We’re landing bigger, bolder and better projects by the quarter it seemed. And then…

🏷️ The unthinkable happened.

Tik Tok did to Joe the unthinkable (especially if you know him): they took his video down. Like Joe, we had the unthinkable happen. We didn’t deliver someone else’s definition of great. Which in the end, is the only definition that matters.

We knew the risks, we tested thoroughly, on-site leading into the event we felt great. But once things got going, it was clear, things weren’t great. And we got shut down. Truly unthinkable. In the last four years, we have pumped out bangers. Nothing remotely close to not delivering the goods.

But that’s the definition of unthinkable. Of all the viral opportunities we’ve had, this one was considered the Santa Paws of them all. This was going to be that hang-your-hat kinda delivery, until it wasn’t.

🔮 That bear is you, but not all of you.

It’s tough to come back from something like that. We really struggled to figure out exactly where to begin. Then we remembered, learnings from that experience certainly taught us something about areas we could grow, but it also affirmed there’s way more to us, and we’re built, through humility and wisdom, to come out of the other side somehow even greater.

Lookout 2025, a bear’s coming.

PS: You know you’re from my generation when you think it’s spelled Santa Clause. There’s just no possible way it can be anything different. Ho ho ho.

James Clair