Election good news, bad news

More from JOHO the blog re the election. The good news: folks from the University of Michigan have provided some additional maps for those depressed by the garden variety red maps. Here's their cartogram by county, which adjusts the sizes of counties according to their population and the color by proportion of votes:

Now the bad news: there's already a report that appears to show that traditionally heavily Democratic counties in Florida apparently voted overwhelmingly for Bush. Gay marriage opponents? Or something else? I'm sure we'll never know.

ID Connections

Yes! Another information design weblog! This one is called ID Connections, from WSU's Center to Bridge the Digital Divide, courtesy of Colleen Taugher. Welcome!

Here's the RSS feed.

UX and visibility

Speaking of filing things away, here's part of an email I just sent to the InfoD-Cafe list in response to Loren Needle's email re information design visibility. Many UX fields (usability, graphic design, IxD, IA, tech writing) have this same "why don't they value us?" kind of undercurrent, and I think Challis makes a critical point. Below is a linked version of my response.

---

Anyways, what I wanted to add to this discussion is to point to Challis Hodge's article titled Design is Broken and Needs to be Fixed. Here's a snippet:

I have listened for decades now as we designers have debated in circles, chased our tails and whined about business not understanding what we do and the value we bring. We talk about making things more usable, about creating brand loyalty, about making the world a better place. We struggle with ROI models, case studies and methods to communicate our value. Still we find ourselves in the same situation, having the same discussion. We just don’t get why business doesn’t understand.

The harsh reality is we designers simply don’t get business. We view our profession as critical, important, and integral to business success and in many ways this is true. However, our dream of playing a top-level strategic role in business is unrealistic--at least under the current circumstances in which we work.

I also think there's another theory that may be of use in these issues of visibility (for we share them with many, many other professions). It's diffusion of innovation theory (Rogers) aka crossing the chasm (Moore) aka the tipping point (Gladwell). It's a very complex and interesting theory, but I think the point that applies here is this: there is a gap/chasm/space between the point where something is used by the early adopters/visionaries and the early majority/pragmatists. And that space has everything to do with communication of value. The language we use is not the language used by those we would seek to convince. For me, this is exactly in line with what Challis is saying. And this is where we should look to find ways to make progress.

Finding hope

Well, George Bush got one thing right: "America has spoken" indeed. Over 55 million Americans wanted a change, but didn't get it. And here in the District, where Bush didn't even draw 10% of the vote, the mood is pretty somber.

I credit John Kerry for being dignified enough to avoid drawing us into a repeat of 2000. But boy, is the future frightening. We've got big problems at home and abroad. But this election did something that no other had done...it got me involved for the first time (other than voting). I wrote letters, I made phone calls, I donated money. So what now?

Well, for one, I have joined the ACLU. It may not be ideal, but it's a start. And then, to make myself feel better (even if falsely) that it's not about "us" versus "them", I played around in Photoshop to create my own version of the election map. Instead of coding each state by winner, I've coded them based on percentage of vote (I used the New York Times data for the percentages, with RGB values equal to %Rep*255, 0, %Dem*255).

Click for a larger version.

Nearly half the states had around 10% swing or less. In other words, there are plenty of people in middle America who voted for Kerry, and plenty in the metros who voted for Bush (including 1/3 of my traditionally bleeding heart liberal county voters). Even the right-most leaning state (Utah) had more than 1/4th of its voters go for Kerry. And more than 1/3 of the voters in Texas didn't want to re-elect W.

What we liberals need to do is engage with the moderate Republicans before we find ourselves back in 1950s America. And honestly, if we don't want 8 more years after this, we need to figure out a way to counteract the Karl Rove machinery, 'cause I'm sure he's not done when W is. (Won't John McCain be surprised when he gets railroaded out again.)

We gotta find the middle. 'Cause we're no match for the new GOP when it comes to arguing the extremes.

Karen Schriver on ballots

Karen Schriver, one of my fave info designers, has been fairly active on the InfoD-Cafe list recently. In her first post, she points to some interesting press coverage in Florida re ballots. This one (Miami Herald; no registration required) points out issues with so-called "broken arrow" ballots. This one (Orlando Sentinel; registration required...feel free to use IDblog/IDblog as your login/password) is a more in-depth critique of Florida's ballots, with Karen as one of the expert reviewers (Tim Shanahan, from the University of Illinois at Chicago's Center for the Study of Literacy, is the other).

Karen's post has led into a very interesting thread, so check out the ID-Cafe archives if this topic is of interest.

ID Case Study: Timelines

David Sless alerted ID-Cafe readers to a recently updated case study on the users’ voice in the timetable dialogue. In it, they use the opportunity to test Tufte's approach to visual timelines. It's a very nice read; the folks at CRIA make even their HTML pages read very nicely ('tho there were some presumably browser issues that caused text to overlap images).

I personally didn't care for the timelines version (it helped that the enhanced numeric version was so nicely designed). And preference (versus performance) wasn't addressed (something I've been interested in since Jared Spool wrote about it). But that may or may not have been an issue...the case study notes that while they were able to test their prototypes with potential users, they didn't have access to all the stakeholders, and thus, weren't able to go to the next level...support both designs to maximize audience usability.

Be sure to check out their publications list for other goodies.

Rock 'n Roll Timeline

My DSL is out, so I'm going to postpone checking this site out in depth, but you may want to go ahead and take a look at the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame Timeline (thanks to Thom on the ID-Cafe mailing list for the pointer).

Preview the new IDJ

Ah, now how's this for interesting promotion. To launch the newly merged Information Design Journal with Document Design, the publisher has made issue 12.1 available online to the public.

In case you aren't aware, IDJ has a very long and prestigious history (the first issue was published in 1979 after the 1978 NATO Conference on Visual Presentation of Information, which was held in the Netherlands). Document Design is much more recent, but for reasons of journal publishing (read: business), merging the two at this time was the way to continue with the spirit of IDJ, if not the title.

If you'are at all interested in this field, do consider subscribing. Yes, the publisher has you jump thru a little hoop for a personal subscription, but I've found them to be very accommodating...just go ahead and email 'em!

Finally, the journal is always looking for good articles, whether they be research reports, case studies, or practical theories. Drop me a line if you have something to add.

This 'n that

Oy, mea culpa for being a bit absent here. Right now, it's been all conferences, all the time for me. I've been one of the coordinators for the Aging by Design conference next week that's being co-hosted by AARP and Bentley College. There's still time to sign up, and we have a fab list of speakers.

I'm also working on what I'm affectionately referring to the "world's largest focus group" at AARP's National Event in Las Vegas in mid-October. If you're nearby, this is such a deal...just $10 for members, $20 for non-members for three days of cool speakers like Dave Barry, Frank Bielec (of Trading Spaces fame...a personal fave), Roger Ebert and more, and a packed exhibit hall.

On top of that, I'm getting reading for the planning meeting for STC's 52nd Annual Conference in Seattle next May. I'm the program manager for this event, and am working to make it a great conference for both STC regulars and newcomers interested in information design, usability, and other UX-related fields.

Announcing UXnet: What Lou said...

I've been waiting for Lou to go first, and he has:

What if...

... you could find out about all the local events and meetings relevant to your work that will take place in your area over the coming weeks?

... your AIfIA membership got you a discount on a subscription to ACM's Interactions magazine? Or your STC membership got you a discount to attend an AIGA event?

... there was an easier way to meet and network with colleagues in your community who cared about developing great user experiences?

... the annual UPA and STC conferences took place in the same location in succession, instead of (frustratingly) in different cities at the exact same time?

... UX (User Experience) emerged as the thread that ties us together--whether we're software developers, interaction designers, content strategists, usability engineers, graphic designers, editors, information architects, or whomever--and allows us to better understand and work with each other?

Besides a minor quibble (it was UPA and DUX that were scheduled at the same time), Lou has really said this wonderfully. Please read the whole post and not just the part I've shamelessly stolen. Or visit the UXnet site and become part of the community. As Lou says:

But there's so much promise in this concept; what we right need now is support, encouragement and, perhaps, a little courage. And soon, volunteers.

Oh, and we're working on the $$ issue too :).

CFP: STC Annual Conference, Seattle, May 8-11, 2005

Do you have something to share about information architecture, usability, or information design? Then STC, the Society for Technical Communication, would like to hear from you! We're currently accepting proposals for our next annual conference.

"That's a tech writers conference." you say. Well, yes, there are many tech writers who attend. But STC is home to several thousand members who belong to its usability, information design, online, and indexing special interest groups, and our conferences attract many outside the "traditional" realm of writing and editing.

Here's just a sampling from last year's conference in Baltimore:

• Keynote by Ben Shneiderman
• A panel on the future of web design featuring Steve Krug, Ginny Redish, Karen Schriver, and Whitney Quesenbery
• Low-cost content management with Ann Rockley
• Strategies and tools for IA (and the closing session) with Thom Haller
• Design Standards and the Development Process with Bill Killam
• Brand Experience with Dirk Knemeyer
• Paper Prototyping with Caroyn Snyder

You can also see more sessions from last year.

Speakers receive a discount on an otherwise value-priced conference. We also welcome speakers from all levels, as our conference attracts those who are new to the field as well as those who have been in the field for decades. And Seattle is a *wonderful* conference city, with the conference is located in the heart of downtown.

To see the full Call or to submit a proposal, please visit the STC CFP site soon.

The deadline for proposals is 12 noon ET, August 12, 2004.

A blog version of show 'n tell

Into photography? Like stories? Then you'd probably enjoy A Picture's Worth. Here's some info:

Officially launched on the 1st of August 2003, ‘A Picture's Worth’ is a personal project that aims to highlight the inspiration that can arise from a photograph and to capture it in the form of words which in turn can reveal the true beauty of a photograph. Ultimately, the project seeks to inspire and enhance captivating story writing and beautiful photography.

In line with the idea that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, visitors are invited to share the memories, emotions or creative stories triggered by a photograph of personal significance. It is hoped that a new photo essay will be posted on the site daily.

Some of the photos are really amazing, and ya just gotta love how the whole "word of mouth" thing works. Now to find a photo with a good story...

Mining the search logs

It's been quite a while, but I finally got around to reviewing the search logs to see what folks were searching for. Over the years, I've actually found some interesting stuff by doing a Google search for some of these.

But I found a couple of, umm, interesting queries this go-round. Here are some highlights:

• last tornado in ohio
• do my bit for information age
• picture of Florence Nightingale's lamp
• psychology of reality television

Okay, it's an information design weblog (with a few political off-topic posts thrown in). Reality TV? Tornado? I don't think so. And while I have blogged some of these (like Florence Nightingale -- an early info designer), the above search queries are clearly doomed to failure.

Maybe people think it's a Google search? There, picture of Florence Nightingale's lamp returns 250 pages.

That said, these still don't match my favorite search query (from work):

I paid my dues now where's my card?

Which, alas, does not return any results on our site either.

Searching for people is common. Recent searches have been for Mary Yeo, Joyce Yee, and John Rheinfrank. John has quite the impressive pedigree (Scient, Doblin Group, and Fitch). I gotta find out how he wound up in daBurgh!

Intro to web fonts

Another list goodie: All you wanted to know about Web type but were afraid to ask. If you like this, be sure to browse the full topic list for more.

Information design goodies

Here are two goodies for information designers. First, there's a fairly comprehensive information timeline from Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at Stanford (from xblog).

There's also Visual Collections, a digital image library of over 300,000 images in cartography, the fine arts, architecture, and photography (from URLwire).

A book for your next flight

I was using Bloglines neat references feature to see who had linked to yesterday's geek item. It turns out that Jim McGee is a Super Geek. More importantly, he had a couple of items in his weblog I found very interesting. First, there was this pointer to a more detailed analysis of the girls are evil proof (the comments are good too).

He also had a link to this cool looking book called Window Seat by Gregory Dicum:

Window Seat decodes the sights to be seen on any flight across North America. Broken down by region, this handy little softcover book features 70 aerial photographs; a fold-out map of North America showing major flight paths; profiles of each region covering its landforms, waterways, and cities; tips on spotting major and not-so-major sights; and straightforward, friendly text on cloud shapes, weather patterns, the continent's history, and more.

Here's a sample page:



There are other sample pages as well. Clicking on the thumbnails there pops up larger images. Looks slick!

Karen Schriver on document design

Karen Schriver was across the pond recently, where she presented a session on The Changing Face of Document Design and Technical Communication at the STIC symposium in the Netherlands. I'd love a more annotated PowerPoint, but I found some of the slides interesting nonetheless...it's worth the ~1Mb download to review her trends and implications. One slide that caught my eye was her trends in professional development, which she mapped as follows:

• Technical writer; focus: words
• Technical communicator; focus: whole text (e.g., books)
• Document designer; focus: visual-verbal integration (e.g., spreads)
• Information designer/info architect; focus: visual-verbal structure (e.g., site map)

Those of you who hate the what's in a name kind of discussions may not be interested, but I certainly appreciate the effort. I'd love to quibble with Karen over the doc design/info design/info architecture borders, but hey, I love to quibble :).

Thanks to InfoDesign for the pointer.

My 15 minutes of fame

Blush...I'm the June profile at one of my favorite sites: InfoDesign. This was actually quite fun, and my thanks go to Peter for the opportunity. It took me longer than I thought to come up with answers, and some of them were quite tough...you try and pick the most important social change...I couldn't. Civil rights, women's rights, the Internet, oh my!

And picking a best place on Earth?!? Yikes! I'm not sure I've been there yet, but of the places I've been, Boston (which really means Boston/Cambridge/Somerville and beyond) is the one I'd go back to (and I hope to!).

Of the links, my faves are MoveOn, WYEP, and Mike's weblog. Ahh, maybe I should have chosen the Internet as the most important social change :).

Historical Event Markup and Linking Project

Hmmm, this one's for the archives--it's the Historical Event Markup and Linking project. It's a bit XML-heavy for me to grok completely, but the concept seems really interesting. Here's Loren Needle's recent description on the InfoD-Cafe list:

A hallmark of the Internet is the opportunity it affords scholars and researchers to present information in novel and interactive ways. One such application that operates in this vein is the Historical Event Markup and Linking Project. The Project allows users to coordinate and navigate through historical materials on the Internet by giving them the ability to create animated maps, interactive timelines or event tables that combine a number of web-based or static resources. The project's homepage contains sample ideas for general perusal, and a developer's guide for interested parties.

Those who are into this history and the Internet phenomenon may be interested in the history dept at George Mason. A PhD that lets you look at new media and IT? How cool is that!

Peter Bogaards on IA and ID

Gee, I'd thought Peter was so busy with the fab informationdesign.org that I hadn't realized how much he'd updated his own site, BogieLand. I particularly like his ID and IA FAQs. Of course, that's because I hold very similar views about the differences between ID and IA (a long-time hobby that is not shared by everybody :).

Coming from the tech comm world, I'd like to think that there are other typical deliverables, but you can't do an IA/ID discussion without a modicum of quibbling (or more :).

I'd mentioned a while ago a great presentation Peter did on sharing knowledge for STC Belgium, but it looks like there are lots of other examples and presentations to browse.

Digital libraries and museums

The latest issue of First Monday is out. IAs and UX types should be interested in some of the articles which are selected from the recent Web-Wise 2004 conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World.

As a Yinzer (you can take the girl out of Pittsburgh, but you can't take Pittsburgh out of the girl), I'm looking forward to reading the Imaging Pittsburgh paper and surfing the Historic Pittsburgh website.

Schriver does the 1040

Rats. The ID-Cafe list, though seemingly using the wonderful mailman list software, has woefully out-of-date archives. If they were current, I would have pointed you to a great post by one of my favorite gurus, Karen Schriver (author of Dynamics in document design).

Karen has recently taken a stab at redesigning the US 1040 tax form. She's now heard back all the reasons why the IRS can't make any of her suggested changes. Sigh.

Check out this expanded detail for a review of the changes and the IRS response. Scary!

Also check out the following PDFs: (1) the original before 1040 form, (2) the after, and (3) ten information design principles guiding the revision (grouped by writing, design, and typography).

Karen is speaking on day 1 of the STC conference (a scary good panel with Steve Krug, Ginny Redish, and Whitney Quesenbery). There's still time to register and STC offers one-day rates :). So if you have a chance, don't miss it!

Reminder: STC Baltimore in May

Wow...how time flies. Just a month ago, I mentioned some of the UX highlights of the upcoming STC conference in Baltimore's fabulous Inner Harbor area (May 9-12). I said I'd be doing more stumping for it as we got closer...well, it's time!

First of all, just a reminder. If you thought STC was just for tech writers, think again! Non-members pay just $650 for a three-day conference featuring over 200 sessions in topics that include usability and information design, tools and technology, theory and research, and management. Early registration is slated to end next Friday, April 23rd. There's a chance they'll extend it through the weekend, but why wait?

UX speakers include Ben Shneiderman (keynote), Steve Krug, Ginny Redish, Whitney Quesenbery, Karen Schriver, Ann Rockley, Bill Killam, Thom Haller, Carol Barnum, Caroline Jarrett, Mike Lee and many more!

Check out the STC conference site for more information and to register. You can also check out an annotated list of usability and information design sessions at the STC Usability SIG website.

Don't miss our tutorials!

If you're planning to attend the conference, or if you're relatively local to Baltimore, I'd also like to encourage you to consider one or more of STC's post-conference tutorial workshops on UX-related topics (you do not have to attend the conference to attend a tutorial workshop). At $100 for a half-day or $200 for a full-day session, these sessions are an excellent value featuring leading speakers in their fields.

HALF-DAY TUTORIALS:

Brand Experience and Technical Communication - AM
Dirk Knemeyer, Thread Inc.

Using the Latest Research to Make Effective Web Design and Usability Decisions - AM
Susan Allison, Bob Bailey, Sanjay Koyani

Understanding Visual Communication - AM
Jean-luc Doumont, JL Consulting

Designing Effective Visuals for Presentations - PM
Jean-luc Doumont, JL Consulting

Managing User-Centered Design Projects - PM
Scott McDaniel and Laura Snyder, Cognetics Corporation

FULL-DAY TUTORIALS:

Crafting Personas to Guide Design
Leanne Logan

Paper Prototyping
Carolyn S. Snyder, Snyder Consulting

Note that if you do not attend one or more days of the conference, there will be a $50 surcharge to sign up for a tutorial...but $250 (or $150) is still a great rate! Visit the STC conference site for more info and to register.

Hope to see you there!

ID in motion

I'm into convergence. I have a combo TV/VCR, a combo TV/DVD, a phone/answering machine, and a Treo that does phone, WWW, and syncs with my Outlook. So I'm not one of those "convergence is a myth" folks. Thus I'm very interested in seeing what happens as broadband becomes commonplace on the Internet. This was part of the reason that I titled my chapter in Content and Complexity (more links in the bottom right nav) "Information Design in Motion."

Anyways, all this is a prequel to a couple of interesting video snippets that came across my inbox today. Not exactly in the traditional ID sense, but both are great examples of how motion on the Internet/WWW is so much more compelling than their broadcast counterparts.

First, there's MoveOn.org's snippet of Donald Rumsfeld who "got caught blatantly contradicting his past statements." You can probably count on one hand the number of people who watched Face the Nation (okay, just a gross exaggeration), thus the ability to actually see Rumsfeld squirm is so much more effective than reading a transcript. And given the blogosphere/email, this snippet is going to be seen a magnitude or more frequently than the original. (Hmmm...it's like Janet Jackson's breast...turnabout is fair play?)

On a completely different note is this slick page from the folks at Lebonze over in the UK. No, it's not exactly a great delivery of any critical information, but c'mon, even if you hate Flash, you have to be just a little bit impressed by the accomplishment. It's seeing this kind of experiment that may help someone else think about new possibilities for interacting with web readers/visitors (a la You Don't Know Jack).

STC Baltimore

Looking for a great conference to go to that's value-priced? Then I'd check out STC's annual conference in Baltimore. I'll stump more for this in the future (closer to the early registration date in late April), but here's are some highlights for the early birds.

• Keynote by Ben Shneiderman
• A panel on the future of web design featuring Steve Krug, Ginny Redish, Karen Schriver, and Whitney Quesenbery.
• Low-cost content management with Ann Rockley.
• Strategies and tools for IA (and the closing session) with Thom Haller
• Design Standards and the Development Process with Bill Killam
• Brand Experience with Dirk Knemeyer
• Paper Prototyping with Caroyn Snyder

and a whole lot more. Check out the full list of usability and information design sessions. And if you haven't been (or think Baltimore is just what you saw on Homicide), let me assure you that Baltimore is a *fab* conference city. Lots of fun for the whole family, or for the single visitor. (Or for the John Waters fan...one of my fave stops is the Papermoon Diner).

For more info, check out the registration page. Hope to see you there!

Virtual Lightbox

Local blogger Matthew Kirschenbaum has announced the release of Virtual Lightbox 2.0. It's a free and open-source application that:

is an inline browser applet for image comparison and manipulation. Users can import images into the applet’s display area, arrange them in any configuration simply by clicking and dragging, magnify them, and apply basic image processing. The Lightbox will be of potential interest to anyone presenting images on the Web in a context where active comparison—what John Unsworth calls a “scholarly primitive”—is desirable.

There's a screenshot that gives you an idea about how this might be used. Slick!

Fun speaker opportunity

Are you attending STC's annual conference in Baltimore's fabulous Inner Harbor in May? Want some more encouragement and/or a fun speaking opportunity? If speakers like Ben Shneiderman, Steve Krug, Ginny Redish, Whitney Quesenbery, Mike Lee, Dirk Knemeyer and Thom Haller don't do it for you, perhaps the idea (and cost savings) of being a speaker yourself may do it! The UID (usability and information design) stem can use just a couple more ID speakers to fill some progression slots that have become available.

In a typical progression, 8-12 speakers with a common theme meet in a large room and speak to 8-10 people at a time, 3x in a 90-minute session. Progressions are casual (no overhead projectors), interactive (meant to include lots of Q&A or discussion), and get you the speaker's discount!

Here are the available progressions. If you're interested, please follow up with Caroline Jarrett (or me, and I'll forward):

UID 5U "Willing and able"
This one is the best choice if you want to talk about how you, a friend, family member or colleague has overcome or interacted with challenges caused by contextual, temporary or permanent impairments.

UID 7B "Section 508 for Dummies"
This one is the best choice if you can contribute thoughts on how to comply with section 508. It's not necessary to be an expert, just to have tried in some way.

UID 3B "Getting started in usability and information design"
This is aimed at people who are probably experienced technical communicators but who are new to usability and/or information design.

UID 10A "Usability and information design progression:intermediate/advanced"
This is aimed at people who are experienced in usability and/or information design and is a good place to discuss an advanced topic.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions or have an idea you want to run by someone.

Otherwise, hope to see you in Baltimore hon!

Bad examples

Local buddy Thom Haller is doing a fun session at the upcoming IA Summit called "Stories from the field: Never consider yourself a failure, you can always serve as a bad example." First of all, this is perhaps one of the best session titles I've heard recently (the other is for a local event titled "Implementing User-Centric Design or 'How to make the customer king when your boss has an emperor complex' " ). Thom's an excellent speaker, so if you're in Austin, I'd stop by!

Second, here's an entry in the "bad examples" class--specifically bad maps--from Joshua Kaufman. At first glance, I would have made the same mistake Joshua did.

Finally, for not any good reason I can articulate, this example seems to me to be a counterpoint of sorts to this article on why you need to be wary of case studies (which hit the blog circuit a while back). Being cautious and understanding specific circumstances is good, but this struck me as being a bit too negative. Your mileage may vary!

Norman on PowerPoint

Am I the only one who is getting tired of seeing David Byrne in the press as the counterpoint to Tufte regarding PowerPoint?

Well, glory hallelujah! It's not mainstream media (yet), but Cliff Atkinson (who is making a career out of fixing organizations' problems with PowerPoint) has an interview with Don Norman on the subject. I like it because it says exactly what I think about PowerPoint.

Here are some extracts I like:

PowerPoint is NOT the problem. The problem is bad talks, and in part, this comes about because of so many pointless meetings, where people with - or without - a point to make - have to give pointless talks. ...

[Re Tufte] Tufte misses the point completely. His famous denunciation of the NASA slides, where he points out that critical information was buried, is not a denunciation of PowerPoint, as he claims. The point was buried because the presenters did not think it important. They were wrong, but it is always easier to find blame in hindsight than with foresight. The slides matched their understanding of the importance of the issues.

Tufte is criticizing the symptom. Tufte has politicized this to benefit his seminars - but the correct culprit is the erroneous analysis of the tests, not the way the engineers decided to present it to their audience. ...

[Re bulletpoints] Bullet points and outlines are not bad ideas. A proper outline structures the talk. Proper bullet points summarize important concepts. The problem comes about when speakers prepare a dense set of outlines, turn them into bullets, and mindlessly read them to the audience. But this problem existed long before PowerPoint.

It's hard to keep up on all the PowerPoint mentions lately, but a good resource if you're so inclined is sooper.org's powerpointless?

Some articles that haven't yet made it to that list but have appeared recently are:

• AP's counterpoint (here on CNN: Does PowerPoint make us stupid?) to the New York Times (PowerPoint Makes You Dumb, available for purchase now). See also mentor's commentary on the subject
• Info@Vis's PowerPoint: anathema or boon?

Finally, while browsing the website of a design firm I worked at in the mid-1990's, I came across a real solution to the fundamental problem: designing PowerPoint presentations to serve only as a speaker's aid rather than to serve the audience. Evil Genius (The Good Side of PowerPoint) shows an option to take advantage of PowerPoint's notes capability to design slides that are visually interesting for audiences (and providing basic cues for speakers) and that have notes to support post-session use. The notes field can also be highlighted to support speakers who require more support than the basic outline provided by the visual slides.

How much information?

In response to a question on the ID-Cafe list, Loren Needles has pointed to a really interesting study from UC Berkeley called How much information? 2003. This study is part of an ongoing effort to estimate how much information is created each year.

Here are some highlights from this year's report:

• Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.
• We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years.
• Information flows through electronic channels -- telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet -- contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls - including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.

The snippets don't do the report justice, in part because the report itself provides lots of useful ways to put the data in context. For example, "five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections." Yowsa!

Speaking of which, it seems worthwhile to pull out a link to Roy Williams' data powers of ten. I couldn't find the live version on Roy's site, so am pointing to the UC Berkeley version instead. Keep it in mind when you want to know the difference between a petabyte and a yottabyte :)

Linkomania

Ouch! Everyone is coming back from the holidays and playing catch-up, so I'm resorting to a quick list o' links so I don't get behind. For your reading pleasure:

• Peterme has a wonderful description about the great information design of US national park brochures. His commentary: "Your Tax Dollars Delivering Good Design."
• A couple good links from circadian shift on info overload/pollution. There's Jakob Nielsen's IM, Not IP (Information Pollution) on instant messaging that is remarkably tame for Jakob. There's also Choice Overload by Stanford's Paul Whitmore (see his home page for more interesting fodder).
• Here's a great site for web design references that I got from Gunnar who got it from Zeldman. Zeldman writes that the site is a "mega-reference containing over 3,000 links to information and articles about web design, with an emphasis on web standards and accessibility."
• Challis points to a new design research roundtable. I don't recognize the participants, but am sympathetic to the problem.
• There are some very interesting anti-Bush commercials at Bush in 30 seconds (I found this one fairly compelling). The ads are causing all sorts of controversy.

BTW, I must have had a senior moment or some glitch in weblog editing, but I meant to point to Dirk Knemeyer's interview with Richard Saul Wurman yesterday. I agree with Christina that folks who have followed Wurman won't be surprised by this interview. I'm also sympathetic that Dirk decided to treat information design and information architecture as "synonymous" ... years ago, when asked about the difference between the two, Wurman shared that he found this kind of discussion "academic and pointless." Boy, I've gotten some mileage out of that quote :).

Welcome InfoDesign!

I hadn't really meant to take a holiday break, but my short vacation from blogging meant a lot of catch up (see below). But I saved the best for last: the metamorphosis of Peter Bogaard's wonderful weblog into a international home for the information design community: InfoDesign: Understanding By Design.

This website is closely allied with a number of other ID-related initiatives, such as the Information Design Journal, the InfoD and InfoD-Cafe email lists, and a number of organizations, particularly the IIID.

Bookmark it ASAP! And if you're an RSS fan, there's a feed for you too.

Rich Gold on PowerPoint

Christina points to UW's David Farkas' course readings in information design as a source of "fine reading". His syllabus is also worth checking out to see how he's chunked them into a semester's worth of work.

Since I've lately been very interested in the "controversy" related to PowerPoint, I wanted to find out more about one of Farkas' readings for week 4: Rich Gold's "Reading PowerPoint" (available in Nancy Allen's Working with Words and Images). Alas, it isn't online, but a bit of Googling turned up this panel transcript from a 1999 Seybold conference on web publishing. Here's a snippet from Gold:

Presenting Powerpoint slides is much like playing a sax in a jazz band. The slides provide the bass, rhythm, and chord changes over which the melody is improvised. When a presenter is really cooking, he or she enters that intuitional state in which each moment follows naturally from the previous in a highly intelligent manner. In flow, the presenter locks into the audience, locks into the slides, locks into the ideas, and produces a gloss that makes whole the obscure and fragmented wall writings.

Alas, Rich Gold, most recently a researcher at Xerox PARC, died early in 2003. Based on a website dedicated to him, I wish I'd come across him earlier. A quick glance through his talks yielded this gem: PowerPoint as a Toy for Thought. It's annotated, so I think it's well worth reading unless you're a committed Tufte zealot :).

Florence Nightingale

I was browsing IDblog's activity log and noticed that a visitor had searched for Florence Nightingale. In case you weren't aware, Nightingale was an early pioneer of information design, specifically in the field of statistical graphics. I had mentioned her in the chapter I did for Content & Complexity (primarily citing Robert Horn).

Finding this search entry prompted me to do a bit of Googling, and I found a handful of interesting resources. First, there's this gallery of historical milestones in data visualization from York University. In it, there are stories and graphics from those you may be familiar with (Minard, Playfair) and those you may not.

An excellent article for ID history buffs is this Nightingale biography from the University of St Andrews, where I retrieved the image at right, an example of what Nightingale called a coxcomb. In this graphic, each pie-shaped wedge represents a month from April 1854 (just north of 9 o'clock) clockwise to March 1855 (just south of 9 o'clock). The outer greenish wedges represent deaths due to diseases such as cholera and typhus, the inner pinkish wedges represent deaths due to wounds, and the brownish wedges represent deaths due to other causes. This illustrated clearly that the major cause of death in British field hospitals during the Crimean War was not directly attributable to battle.

Statistics fans will also find Florence Nightingale's Statistical Diagrams an interesting read. Finally, real fans may want to stay tuned, as the University of Guelph is undertaking an effort to publish the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. It looks like the volume related to her statistical work is one of the later ones (volume 14?).

Tim Bray on PowerPoint

I've been mining Oskar's blogroll. Yes Virginia, another PowerPoint entry! This one is from Tim Bray, who comments On Bulleted Lists and Evil. Tim writes:

If you’re going to escape the tyranny of the bullet point, you have to get away from the idea that what’s in your slides is the content of your presentation. Slides aren’t big enough or rich enough or smart enough to themselves contain any presentation worth listening to for more than about ten minutes. Instead, your slides are a visual auxiliary to your material; no more, no less.

Am I being crass for suggesting this is another "not the tool, but the toolsmith" perspective?

Information literacy

Mentor points to an Australian piece about information literacy and notes that tools are not the end-all, be-all. In the article, author Nathan Cochrane takes the position that for many of us, our skill sets may not be equal to the amount of information at our disposal:

Despite having more information at our fingertips than any generation before, there is little evidence that our ability to make good, timely decisions has improved. ... We have computer hardware and software but often ignore "wetware" - the first, most important, cog in the information seeking machine is ourselves.

Here are a few resources I found with a quick Google search that seem interesting re this subject: National Forum on Information Literacy (San Jose State University), Sheila Webber's information literacy weblog, and the ACRL Institute for Information Literacy.

Doc Searls on presentations

Sick to death of PowerPoint-related entries? Then stop reading now :). John Robb points to an old essay on presentations from Doc Searls. Doc has a love/hate relationship with PowerPoint. He writes:

First, I've got to say I love PowerPoint, just like I used to love Persuasion, and before that I loved MORE, which was the original presentation program. In fact, I'm one of those guys for whom no software ever got in the way of anything other than the time I should spend away from the computer.

But I do hate how it gets in the way, because it has this fascist wrongheadedness about what a presentation is supposed to be. To me the PowerPoint "Wizard" is this Nazi interrogator who says "Vee haff vays uff making you talk."

There's a lot more useful information about actually doing presentations, which I think supports my position that the problem is not the tool. The real issue is the lack of emphasis on designing something that really supports the audience rather than the speaker. Doc's got some useful real-world suggestions for changing the focus...check it out!

Perception is reality

I've already double-updated my recent still more Tufte entry, so it's time for a new entry. This one is from Peter Coffee of eWeek: Perception is Reality. The part I liked:

I part company with Tufte when he blames this kind of sloppiness on PowerPoint itself. He compares it to a drug with "frequent, serious side effects" of inducing stupidity, wasting time and degrading "the quality and credibility of communication." He's wrong. PowerPoint doesn't corrupt; it concentrates. If you have something useful to say, it helps you say it in a more effective way; if you're ignorant or confused, PowerPoint makes it more obvious, but only to an audience that isn't in the same condition. Moreover, I'd argue that it's easier to be deliberately obscure, and to cover one's self against every possible outcome, in a document laden with footnotes and appendices than it is in a 40-word chart.

Thanks to Dave Weinberger for the pointer...and check out Dave's entry to find out why Hamlet wouldn't work as a newspaper article.

A history of information design

Conrad Taylor has generated another fab document for the information design community: it's his perspective of a specific information design history, based on his work for the UK-based firm Popular Communication. He writes:

The process of choosing which communication principles to teach, especially for our design and writing courses, has caused me and several of my colleagues to align ourselves with the Information Design movement. At the same time, we've drawn inspiration from people who are not usually identified as part of the Information Design community, such as Jan White (on publication design), David Ogilvy (on advertising writing and design), and various proponents of Plain English.

From this point of view, I suggest that in figuring out "where Information Design has come from", we can usefully look beyond the usual suspects: it's not only self-identified ID "believers" who have contributed good ideas about how to communicate clearly, effectively and appropriately.

ID history buffs may also be interested in an ID timeline I put together a while back for STC's Information Design SIG. It needs updating, but I may wait until the new year, when the InfoDesign countdown elapses and we're treated to the next important step in ID history!

Still more Tufte

I'm not sure how I missed this...I must have added Design Observer to my latest RSS aggregator after this entry. Anyways, early in November, William Drentel added a part 2 on Tufte as a sequel to Jessica Helfand's part 1. I did blog the part 1, particularly since I didn't exactly agree with the point (nor did others...see the comments with the entry).

But I find a lot more to agree with in part 2. In particular, I think this is spot on:

...I want to suggest that PowerPoint was probably not a major contributor to the Columbia tragedy: it is pretty clear from the investigation and its final report that many people within NASA and Boeing thought the leaking foam was a (more) dangerous problem, and that the culture of NASA led to these voices being ignored.

Alas, I'm not quite ready, as Drentel seems to be, to buy into the view that PowerPoint is evil. One point that seems to be rather absent from these discussions is the fact that PowerPoint has other options than the bullet point to display information. The fact that speakers and corporations all over the nation (or globe) rely too heavily on bullet points is perhaps properly more an indictment of our bordering-on-zero visual design/literacy skills. There also seems to be very little discussion of the likelihood that the majority of slide authors make slides as a speaker's aid, rather than an audience (or reader) aid. From my current perspective, I wonder whether this might not be another "blame the author, not the tool" situation.

For others interested in this subject, I'm sure you'll want to check out the resources Drentel mentioned: Tufte's recent interview with I.D. magazine and Ian Parker's essay, originally published in the New Yorker: Absolute Powerpoint: Can A Software Package Edit Our Thoughts (published May 28, 2001).

Update, 12/14: Well, according to the NYTimes, PowerPoint isn't evil, instead PowerPoint Makes You Dumb. Yikes. Score another one for the Tufte/Nielsen "isn't spin great?" machinery.

Update, 12/15: Over on heyblog, Andrew echoes my thoughts re Helfand's issues with Tufte (though I didn't use the term "buttheaded rant" :). He does add some additional useful commentary re Tufte's Ask ET forums that's worth checking out. BTW, I work with Andrew's dad...how's that for small world?

One hot design book

Here's a new book that's making the rounds: Universal Principles of Design. Mike dropped by my office a couple days ago to show it to me, after having heard about it from Victor (who heard about it from Adam).

The buzz may well be justified. Here's a blurb from Amazon:

Universal Principles of Design is the first comprehensive, cross-disciplinary encyclopedia of design. Richly illustrated and easy to navigate, it pairs clear explanations of every design concept with visual examples of the concepts applied in practice. From the "80/20 rule to chunking, from baby-face bias to Occam's razor, and from self-similarity to storytelling, every major design concept is defined and illustrated for readers to expand their knowledge.

Courtesy of one-click ordering, it's on its way to my mailbox!

Bad graphs?

You may want to file this one away as an example of how graphs can mislead. Dave Weinberger notes that in "an otherwise balanced article on Linux's challenge to Windows," InfoWeek illustrates its points with some questionable graphics. Such as:

The casual reader may miss an important point...the scale on the two graphs. The Windows graph scale goes up to 80%; the Linux graph that appears very similar goes up only to 40%.

I don't know how the graphs were laid out in the print version of the article, though since they aren't on the same page in the online version at InfoWeek (except on the printable version), I suspect the print version is the one that caused Dave to cry foul.

The text of the article is less misleading, clearly noting that:

With Windows, 79% worry about software vulnerabilities and overall quality and 64% about high cost of ownership. With Linux, 40% cite concern about the lack of a complete and fully integrated software environment and 37% about accountability if problems arise.

Thanks to vanderwal.net for the pointer.

Future of information visualization

There's been an interesting discussion on the SIGIA list about information visualization. It was originally about the relationship about IA to infovis, which I thought a really cool topic, but it has morphed into a discussion about the general usefulness of information visualization, period.

I've always viewed information visualization as a technology-supported kind of information graphics. Where the latter tend to be two-dimensional and static (think USAToday), the former is typically software intensive, database-driven, and often representing attribute/value pairs that can be viewed in user-selected ways. I've been exposed to how cool infovis can be thru peripheral experience on a infovis prototype for DARPA.

Ah, but there's the rub. Can infovis be commercially successful? That's the gist of the recent discussion. Here are two interesting links that appeared on the list today. First, on the pessimistic side is this interview peterme did with Marti Hearst from UCBerkeley:

Marti forecasts a significant change in how visualizations are approached. In the past, they've been treated as standalone applications ... Where as the key for the future will be incorporating it as a small part in a larger system, integrating it with the rest of the interface. In doing so, this will require visualizations to seriously take the problem that users want to solve into account, a motivation currently lacking from many visualizations.

On the optimistic side, Ramana Rao looks forward to 2007, when he hopes we'll have overcome some past distractions:

We were willing to drop back considerably in interface quality for many years because of the rich sources of information and knowledge, new services, connections to other people available through the Internet. Only now are we getting back to considering simpler and richer ways of interacting with content, services, people.

If you want to check out information visualization, I'd suggest starting with OLIVE from the folks at UMD and this resources page from Stanford.

Mo's design luv

I came across Moluv's Picks today. I'm on dialup for another week until Verizon gets my DSL moved, so I'm not going to surf this site too much for now. But design fans may want to check it out. Too bad there is no obvious RSS feed.

More borgasmord

Here are a few links that caught my eye recently:

• Re-UseIt. Here are the entries for the contest to redesign Jakob's useit.com. I wasn't that into this contest when it was originally announced, but what's cool about it is to see how 50+ different people approached the same task. And how really challenging it apparently must be to improve on something so originally boring.
• Dan Saffer is doing an interaction design degree at Carnegie Mellon and blogging all about it. Thanks to classmate Chad Thornton who is a year or so ahead (and also sharing cool stuff) for the pointer.
• Across the pond, there's a cool initiative called mySociety.org which aims "to build internet projects which have strong, real world benefits, and which do so at very low cost per person served." They have an impressive list of proposals that they've already received. Thanks to anne galloway for the pointer.

Helfand on Tufte

Over on the ID-Cafe list today, there was quite a bit of discussion about Jessica Helfand's recent weblog entry about Edward Tufte re his appearance with David Byrne in Wired (which I mentioned a while back).

It's an interesting read, but I'm not sure I get what seems to be her actual criticism:

Both Byrne and Tufte are self-proclaimed experts. Yet in spite of what they might have you believe, neither are artists -- in that formally attuned, conceptually rigorous way, for instance, that one might look at Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol ...

Huh? That's the criticism that can be leveled by one of the talents of the graphic design field? It's not that I disagree with another of her criticisms:

Tufte's expertise is not only self-proclaimed -- it is also deeply and irrevocably self-serving.

In this area, I think Tufte has much in common with Jakob Nielsen...both are as adept at media spin as they are in their field of expertise. That said, I would far rather see a criticism based on the merit of some of Tufte's actual work (much like this one at Boxes and Arrows re Nielsen) than to point out that Tufte isn't Andy Warhol.

Skiing? I think not...

If I were HCI queen, here are a few things I would change:

1. Banks would not ask you if you wanted your ATM transaction in Spanish or English when you hadn't ever chosen Spanish (after several years).
2. Applications would know when something was singular or plural, so you wouldn't see "You have one new emails!"
3. And just because I chose the "ski" lifestyle content from the Weather Channel's email forecast service, I wouldn't see the subject "Beth, here is your weather and ski forecast for Washington, DC" when the expected temperature the next day is 80 degrees!

They do provide me with a link that shows snow quality (hey, let's hop on a plane...there's poweder in North Dakota!). But still...I think that dropping the "and ski" from the subject might make sense when it's only the Rockefellers or the Vanderbilts who may be jetting off thousands of miles to find off-season snow.

Skills Framework for the Information Age

Here's another email list tidbit. Whitney Quesenbery pointed to an interesting initiative across the pond: it's the UK-based Skills Framework for the Information Age Foundation (SFIA). From the what is SFIA? page:

The Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) provides a common reference model for the identification of the skills needed to develop effective Information Systems (IS) making use of Information Communications Technologies (ICT). It is a simple and logical two-dimensional framework consisting of areas of work on one axis and levels of responsibility on the other.

There's a section that describes the structure of the SFIA framework, which describes "what ICT practitioners and users do."

When I get a few moments, I'm looking forward to exploring this in more detail. There may well be some useful concepts for the whole "big picture" UX/ED issue.

Design conference borgashmord

I meant to get to this earlier, but peterme has written volumes on his weblog about some recent UX/ED conferences. First, he writes four entries about the HITS 2003 conference (one, two, three, and a postscript). If you're so inclined, you can get HITS slides and posters.

Next, he waxed poetic about About, With and For in two parts (one and two). This conference was a 1+ day event at IIT immediately after HITS2003 and seemingly geared towards a student audience (IIT students attend free).

He was less happy with a conference he didn't attend: AIGA's Power of Design. Peter was not impressed with the seeming "circle jerk" supposedly described by Dirk Kneymeyer's notes from the conference. Not sure I agree with him there, but his view seems widely shared among the non-AIGA UX/ED folks. Perhaps a challenge for DUX2005?

More from Clement Mok

Oy, I've had to change the channel...the Yankees have tied it up :(. Courtesy of TiVo, I can watch the rest of the game later if it doesn't go even more downhill. In the meantime, here's a quickie post to take my mind off the game (and the MLB.com score card in the background).

The latest issue of NextD journal has come out with an interview with Clement Mok [ framed | unframed ]. This follows up on his recent Time for a Change call to design professionals, which has also appeared in Communication Arts.

Over on Contact Sheet, Scott provides an interesting take on this call. He also points out that you can get the snazzy version of of this pitch here. I don't mind the Flash presentation, but think it might not have been the best design to assume the reading speed they did. Making folks click next would be bad, but a small speed and/or rewind control wouldn't have hurt!

Cool weblog

I came across the byrdhouse review today. It's tagline is "Smart talk about architecture, design, and photography." Very nice!

Two entries I particularly enjoyed were modHouse, which shows a series of logo comps that were developed for a client, and a recipe for color, which describes a neat way for coming up with a natural color palette for design.

The latter is cool just because it is such an easy technique to reproduce. The former is cool because it exposes something from the field of design that I'm not sure is common in the field of web design, and that's the idea of exploring lots and lots of solutions to a design problem.

I think this is related to the problem with high-fidelity prototypes. Once you get close to something that is real, it makes it much harder to go outside the box and consider a design that isn't simply an extension of a known design.

Hmmm...is it a design meme? Kevin, like Ken, is into the cropped face as blog design element.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde...

If you enjoyed the "According to a Cambridge researcher..." parlor trick that went around a while ago, you may also enjoy this page, which has a lot more useful stuff. Matt Davis provides some very interesting info about what's true and what's not necessarily true, and also a summary of what may have been the source of the theory. You can also find the same text in a whole bunch of different languages.

Information on the Assembly Line

Rats...it's a class night, and I've got to catch up on a couple chapters. So I can't do much more than make a quick blog entry for Jason Nichols' very intriguing looking masters thesis called Information on the Assembly Line (subtitled A review of Information Design and its Implications for Technical Communicators). Here's the PDF link if you prefer that to his HTML version (which is nicely designed).

I jumped right to the Defining Information Design chapter, and appreciated this comment for its general relevance in UX/ED/ID/IA:

While very few people seem to agree on just what information design is, everyone does agree that the reason it is so hard to define is that it draws from so many other disciplines and professions. ... As Robert Jacobson explains, the emerging field of information design possesses very little research, experimentation results, case studies, or anecdotal evidence that it can call its own. It thereby lacks a "coherent corpus of rules or principles a novice can obey".

I can't wait to dive into this and find out why the final chapter is called The Need to Learn Database Design Principles. Hmmmm.

BTW, thanks to Peter for another great tip.

NYTimes on PowerPoint

The recent media fascination with PowerPoint continues, with the latest coming from the New York Times (free, registration required):

Is there anything so deadening to the soul as a PowerPoint presentation?

Critics have complained about the computerized slide shows, produced with the ubiquitous software from Microsoft, since the technology was first introduced 10 years ago. Last week, The New Yorker magazine included a cartoon showing a job interview in hell: "I need someone well versed in the art of torture," the interviewer says. "Do you know PowerPoint?"

The article goes on to rather superficially deal with the question of whether "PowerPoint-muffled messages have real consequences, perhaps even of life or death." The article summarized Tufte's analysis of one of the slides Boeing assembled related to the recent Columbia disaster this way:

Among other problems, Mr. Tufte said, a crucial piece of information — that the chunk of foam was hundreds of times larger than anything that had ever been tested — was relegated to the last point on the slide, squeezed into insignificance on a frame that suggested damage to the wing was minor.

As I just commented on the ID-Cafe list, I wonder if his analysis isn't really a bigger indictment of a human (or business?) tendency to either avoid saying something your superiors don't want to hear or the inability to actually find the relevant facts in a sea of data.

With all its faults, is PowerPoint really the reason that this key piece of evidence was buried where it was?

To caption or not to caption?

This recent First Monday article on the writing photo captions for the web is an interesting counterpoint to nowords.org, a photo gallery of satellite images and illustrations (the latter almost look like they could have been microscopic images). At least in the case of the satellite imagery, I would have loved to have known what I was looking at. Alas, no clue, not even ALT text.

Writing first for the web

We're fortunate to have Ginny Redish as a usability consultant (ah, one of the perks of living where we do :). I was poking around her website this morning and noticed that she had a handout online (PDF) that was a slightly updated version of her popular "Writing for the Web" presentation.

I must admit to having a bit of an "a ha" when I came across a point I think was relatively new. She wrote:

In the future, organize and write for the web first. If it is easy to use on the web, it will almost certainly make a great paper document.

In retrospect, it's kind of a "why didn't I think of that?" But if organizations could put it in place as a process, I think it might well improve both our online and print documents!

Usability and voting

This morning on the AIGA Experience Design list, Whitney pointed to a great resource on the UPA website. It's their voting and usability project. Fans of recent events (or California residents) may want to check out their section on the California recall election.

Umm, not exactly?

I suppose it's me, but it seems to me that MIT is confused about information architecture and information design:

Information design can be defined as the art and science of structuring and classifying web sites and intranets to help people find and manage information. Information Architecture is the process or organizing and labeling content in a way your audience will understand.

I still haven't got past the (to me, compelling) idea that IA is about finding information in a site or info product and ID is about using information once it is found.

Wired PowerPoint

I shouldn't feel so pleased with myself (this wasn't exactly hard), but just a bit of URL hacking has yielded the second of Wired's two articles on PowerPoint (from their September issue).

The first, posted today, is by David Byrne: Learning to Love PowerPoint:

Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent.

The second, which will be officially posted tomorrow, is by Edward Tufte: PowerPoint is Evil:

At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple.

I've gotten Byrne's book (see last week). I've still not played the DVD, but the book left me less than wowed. The Wired article shows a few of the better pieces. There are many in the book where Byrne seems to have been "making fun of the medium" ... or something.

Conrad on literacy

Conrad Taylor has made available what looks to be an interesting read on "new" kinds of literacy: visual, media, and information. He wrote this as the backdrop for a forthcoming workshop in London called "Explanatory & Instructional Graphics and Visual Information Literacy." His 22-page paper, "New kinds of literacy, and the world of visual information" (PDF; 400K),

explains the history of these terms and asks whether these metaphorical extensions of ‘literacy’ are just a rhetorical device to inflate the importance of these fields of study, or if there really are literacy-like aspects to them. He concludes that there is at least a case for the concept of Visual Literacy when it applies to information graphics: we could call this Visual Information Literacy.

As an aside, I sure wish that more proceedings papers were as nicely designed as this one!

Brands and culture

Andrew Zolli has an interesting read about brands, commercialism, and culture in his weblog called No Logo vs. Pro Logo: How Both Sides Get It Wrong (sorry, you gotta scroll...no permalinks). He makes a fairly good case for why the "anti-corporate activist and corporate leader" need to meet in the middle:

For starters, brands aren't invading the culture, for many they are the culture. The marketplace has trumped other 'meaning making' institutions in people's lives, from political parties to religious institutions. Ask an average citizen to name their elected representatives and you'll get a disinterested stare, but everybody has a passionately held opinion about Walmart.

There's more good stuff there. But I must admit that every once in a while, I just get a kick out of checking out the activist stuff (like these spoof ads from the folks at Adbusters).

Dilbert does Tufte

From dilbert.com.

Speaking of PowerPoint, here's an interesting link from Shane at co][nz: it's David Byrne and his "Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information." Talking Heads fans may appreciate the publisher's description, part of whi