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 encourage you … more »

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 … more »

The fourth sin in my ongoing Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging series (being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, unfindable, and inattentive) is being unreadable. Readability is probably the easiest sin to correct, especially if you’re familiar with your stylesheet. Reading Instincts A while ago I moved The Content Wrangler to WordPress and used a Massive News theme as a starting point. I liked the way the Massive News … more »

Paul Masalsky argues that screen captures in documentation introduce more trouble than they’re worth. Localization is the main difficulty. Another is size and the fact that many times the screenshots duplicate what the user already sees in the interface. This post raises a lot of issues that are worth exploring. While I agree that screenshots are problematic, I also think that without them, your documentation’s … more »

Have you ever tried to find cool graphics for conceptual diagrams but find yourself coming up empty handed? Sure, sites like istockphoto.com make icons available inexpensively. But no matter what the cost, if you work for a company you still have to submit an expense request, get it approved by management, and then subtract the cost from a dwindling budget. It’s a pain in the … more »

InDesignSecrets » Blog Archive » Eliminating YDB (Yucky Discolored Box) Syndrome. If you ever put transparent images over colored backgrounds in Indesign, you need to apply this tweak to avoid discoloration issues around your image.

AIRTIGHT – Viewers. These effects simply blow my mind. Am trying to integrate a cool slideshow like effect into a blog. Maybe one of these will work.

TiltViewer Pretty amazing viewer for graphics.

Free Clipart and images | Quentin Brown

Presentation Zen: 10 rules for making good design

Screen capture example implementing numbered callouts

Image Formats.

A listener to the Tech Writer Voices podcast suggested I do a podcast on the following: Give ideas to people who are just starting out in technical writing. What is the base of knowledge that every technical writer should have? And so in preparation for the podcast, I offer these five skills or characteristics as absolute musts for the technical writer: