Upcoming Webinar: Designing Quick Reference Guides
I'm giving an STC webinar this week on designing quick reference guides. Here are the details:
Designing Quick Reference Guides
Date: Wednesday, 25 January | 1:00–2:00 PM EST (GMT-5)
Condensing a manual into an attractive quick reference guide requires a poet's precision with language, but it also requires you to exercise skill with visual design and page layout. These short guides blend marketing with instruction, allowing you to combine text with images to pull readers into the content. Long manuals are outdated, ineffective ways to teach people software.
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The quick reference guide (usually 2 to 6 pages), with strong visuals and a magazine-like layout, is something that end-users, project managers, and just about everyone absolutely loves. Quick reference guides should be a standard deliverable that technical communicators emphasize and prioritize in their work.
By the way, if you can't make the webinar but you're still interested in the topic of quick reference guides, see this page of quick reference guide resources on my blog.
Feb 19, 2012 update: You can access a recording of the webinar here.
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, agent skills, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my AI courses for more on the latest in AI and tech comm. If you're looking for info about documenting APIs, see my API documentation course.
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Finally, I want to note a couple of things. I usually write the first drafts of my posts myself and then use AI to improve accuracy, clarity, and detail in places, so my writing is a mix of human and AI. (Hopefully that's not too off-putting.) Also, the opinions I express on my blog are my own perspectives, not those of my employer.