I received the following question from a reader: Hi Tom, I absolutely love your column and feel as though you are writing for me. I was wondering if you could devote an article, or maybe you already have, about how to approach programmers about their screen designs. Our company has three totally separate divisions that Continue Reading »
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 Continue Reading »
My wife Jane attended a Segullah writer’s retreat conference this weekend. During the conference, one of the presenters explained a common mistake many novice writers make: they look for stories to fit a pre-selected theme. You hear the result of this strategy most commonly in church talks. Someone is assigned a topic, or has a Continue Reading »
Catalyst 2: User Experience We didn’t have a very good support model for the application. It became clear that our service desk, which included mostly BYU students working part-time and supporting over 100 different applications, couldn’t answer questions that users had. They would only escalate the questions to us. And not many of our customers Continue Reading »
Given that it’s a new year, a lot of people are writing about trends and predictions in technical communication. Ellis Pratt at Cherryleaf has an interesting post on the Top 10 Trends in Technical Communication for 2010. Larry Kunz has a post on Technical Communication Trends in 2010. Sarah O’Keefe chimed in with 2010 Predictions for Continue Reading »
I spent much of last week with my head inside a Mediawiki skin (when I probably should have been working on another project). I’m not entirely sure what it is, but I sometimes get fixated by technical problems I can’t seem to solve. I first customized the FraternalRelief Mediawiki skin to match my organization’s home Continue Reading »
12/9/09 update: I changed it back. I recently decided to change my blog theme. I know that people are interested in content more than design, but it’s worth a post explaining why I changed this theme. I’ve had the Limau Orange theme on my blog for about two years now. I grew tired of looking Continue Reading »
When you insert a transparent image over a color background in Adobe InDesign, the transparent image may look good when you generate the PDF, but when you actually print the image from a laser printer, the transparent image has a faint background where the image should otherwise be transparent. I spent a long time trying Continue Reading »