I'd Rather Be Writing

At the last STC Summit in Dallas, one of the most attended sessions was Don Moyer's Building Visual Explanations: Practical Advice for Writers. I was recently listening to the recording of the session. I've been feeling more and more lately that I need to develop my visual imagination. Illustrating concepts isn't difficult, Moyer said. The hard part is coming up with the idea of the illustration, the napkin sketch. The rest is just "fancy execution," he ... Read more..

Recently I wrote a wiki page listing all the benefits of installing Internet access in LDS meetinghouses. After I published my list, I realized the page was text heavy -- so much that it looked uninviting and intimidating, even though the content itself was good. You can view the avalanche of text here. I like to think that text lays the foundation for graphics that will later follow. After all, you can't create a graphic without knowing ... Read more..

Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign integrate in a cool way when it comes to images. Let's say you have a layered image in Illustrator. When you insert that illustrator .ai file into InDesign, you can turn the layers on or off within InDesign itself. This control with the layers allows you to use the same image multiple times without duplicating it or exporting it to another format. Here's a screencast showing how I implemented this integration in ... Read more..

Lately I've been working on quick reference guides that contain a lot of callouts around screenshots. (By callouts, I mean explanatory text that points to some part of the image.) In trying to come up with the right design for callouts, I surveyed how other authors approached callouts. Below is a sampling of about 14 different approaches to callouts, with my analysis below each example. Some Examples of Callouts [caption id="attachment_8495" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Callout example 1"][/caption] The author ... Read more..

[caption id="attachment_8829" align="alignright" width="225" caption="Visual Composing: Document Design for Print and Digital Media"][/caption] [audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3?http://idratherbewriting.com/podcasts/mackiewicz.mp3] Download MP3 Length: 45 min. Recently Jo Mackiewicz (Auburn University) and Kathryn Riley (Illinois Institute of Technology) published Visual Composing: Document Design for Print and Digital Media with Pearson. This book covers the visual side of document design, including all the design decisions from the font you use to the colors you choose to the tables, column widths, images types, and more. I interviewed Jo ... Read more..

[caption id="attachment_3901" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Trees, maps, and theorems, by Jean-luc Duomont"][/caption] I'm currently reading Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds, a new book by Jean-luc Doumont. The reason I wanted to read the book is for Jean-luc's expertise in visual design and page layout, because I thought it could help me design better quick reference guides. Although very little of the book deals with design and is more geared toward engineers (the "rational ... Read more..

One can hardly dismiss the power of visuals. One of the oldest truisms in communication is that a picture is worth a 1,000 words. Instead of lengthy text, we praise infographics, diagrams, workflows, and other visual illustrations that communicate ideas. (See this collection of New York Times infographics.) In Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, Robert Horn's main premise is that the combination of text with visuals creates a powerful form of communication. The other day a colleague, ... Read more..

[caption id="attachment_9719" align="alignright" width="125" caption="A Practical Guide to Designing with Data, by Brian Suda"][/caption] A Practical Guide to Designing with Data (Five Simple Steps, 2010), by Brian Suda, is a thorough exploration of best practices for graphs and charts. It's somewhat similar to Edward Tufte's Visualizing Information in focus, and both have a shared antipathy toward "chart junk" in the effort to tell the story of data. Suda explains, The main purpose of this book is to ... Read more..

Lately I've been reading Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin: Selling Ideas and Solving Problems Through Pictures. In the book, Roam asserts that drawing pictures can help you solve problems. It's a simple but profound assertion. You're no doubt familiar with the same assertion with writing. Writing is a tool for thinking, a method for unlocking ideas. Writing about something helps you think about it, helps you see the problem more clearly, helps you see ... Read more..

A few years ago, I was scouring magazines to get ideas for quick reference guide layouts. In particular, I found that WIRED magazine has some of the most creative and engaging layouts, often with text laid out in three or four columns, or along the side of a graphic, or in various quadrants about the page. I was trying to figure out the right layouts that would give my quick reference guides the same eye-popping appeal ... Read more..