This Thursday, my colleague Ben Minson and I are presenting to the Intermountain STC chapter on “Quick Reference Guides: Short and Sweet Technical Documentation.” Here’s a description of the presentation:

Quick reference guides provide one or two page condensed instructions. Formats for quick reference guides vary dramatically and can involve complex, multi-colored layouts, or just simple text callouts next to a few images. The other day I stopped by a local thrift store (Desert Industries) and picked up a few magazines for $.25 cents a piece, looking for attractive layouts that I could use as … more »

How many times have you written a 75+ page guide and heard the customer say, This is great, but can you give us a condensed version? After the third or fourth time I’d heard this, I decided to actually try it. I wasn’t sure exactly how to lay it out, so I spent a couple of days flipping through magazines — especially WIRED — looking … more »