The St. Louis Group for Information Architecture will be holding its December meeting on Thursday, December 6. The meeting will convene at 7 p.m. at the offices of XPLANE (809 Geyer Avenue in the Soulard neighborhood). After IA-related discussion, the meeting will most likely move across the street to Norton’s again. Attendance is open to all. The topic for this month’s meeting is “Incorporating Information Architecture Concepts Into Your Job Role.” It will introduce IA to those not familiar with it, and focus on how concepts and ideas can be applied by those who aren’t “information architects” by trade. Attendees are asked to review the following two links before the meeting (it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes), as these will provide the initial basis for discussion:
–> http://www.challishodge.com/img/ed_model_Dd.gif
–> http://jjg.net/ia/elements.pdf

“Unless you have the power to make business and development decisions for your project, some of your energy will be spent influencing those that do. Experienced usability engineers or interaction designers may have limited skill in influence, despite how significantly it can effect their ability to contribute to projects. It’s the smartest and most effective designers that work to understand the human to human interaction within their project teams, as part of their work towards better human to computer interaction.”

“Web-site designers should understand their users’ way of thinking, introduce them to content they didn’t know they were looking for, and — most of all — keep them from using the search function, according to a report released on Monday by Web research firm User Interface Engineering.”

“Web-site designers should understand their users’ way of thinking, introduce them to content they didn’t know they were looking for, and — most of all — keep them from using the search function, according to a report released on Monday by Web research firm User Interface Engineering.”

“Welcome to the world’s first hypertext encyclopedia of toons — which will soon, I hope, come to be regarded as the Internet’s most comprehensive source of information about the U.S. toon scene. So, what’s a toon? A toon is a cartoon or cartoon character — ‘cartoon’ referring not just to the animated kind, but also to such “still cartoons” as comic books, newspaper strips, magazine cartoons, etc.”

“Inventions come in all shapes and sizes. Some are as simple as purple catsup. Others push the limits of quantum physics. The real measure of an invention is not just how well it works or how impressively it is engineered, but how it changes our lives.”

“Perhaps slowest moving of all is our communal understanding of how to practice information architecture effectively. It’s so easy to move fast and learn little. As we slow down, hopefully we can leverage the concepts of facets and layers to break the infinite loop of destructive creation, designing information architectures that are both enduring and adaptive at the same time.”

“Welcome to the world’s first hypertext encyclopedia of toons — which will soon, I hope, come to be regarded as the Internet’s most comprehensive source of information about the U.S. toon scene. So, what’s a toon? A toon is a cartoon or cartoon character — ‘cartoon’ referring not just to the animated kind, but also to such “still cartoons” as comic books, newspaper strips, magazine cartoons, etc.”

“I spent a few semesters teaching typography at an institute of art and design. My classes began on the first day with a short quiz asking students — at that stage three years into a communications design degree —to draw some basic symbols such as an ampersand and an apostrophe, and to mark suggestions for typographic improvements to some fairly shabby copy I’d written. Term after term I’d go over the tests and scratch my head wondering what they’d been up to the past three years. With due respect to my colleagues in the program — many of whom taught in addition to running corporate design shops or ad agencies — the education had plainly focused away from what I consider the primary goal of communication design: to make vital, engaging work intended above all to be read. To use design to communicate.”

“The desktop metaphor was a brilliant innovation — 30 years ago. Now it’s an unmanageable mess, and the search is on for a better way to handle information.”

“No serious poster enthusiast would question San Francisco’s supremacy as the Mecca and mother lode of rock and roll art. And as the psychedelic explosion in Haight Ashbury reverberated across the country and around the world, other cities began to produce posters in homage to the original Sixties esthetic that drove the poster renaissance in San Francisco. Yet arguably, after San Francisco, no city can boast as rich a music poster tradition as Austin, Texas, where from the mid-Sixties until today a fortuitous combination of factors has spawned a mind-boggling barrage of posters and handbills.”

“There are a plethora of books dedicated to the art of negotiating — and indeed it is truly an art — but I think the graphic design business in particular is very unique to the dynamics of negotiations. Constant negotiations are simultaneously taking place regarding almost every aspect of our projects. I cannot think of any other profession that incessantly finds its peers whining more about losing the core value of their esteemed endeavors due to constant client changes, pricing, the final design-all of which become mired in our ability (or inability) to negotiate successfully.”

“No serious poster enthusiast would question San Francisco’s supremacy as the Mecca and mother lode of rock and roll art. And as the psychedelic explosion in Haight Ashbury reverberated across the country and around the world, other cities began to produce posters in homage to the original Sixties esthetic that drove the poster renaissance in San Francisco. Yet arguably, after San Francisco, no city can boast as rich a music poster tradition as Austin, Texas, where from the mid-Sixties until today a fortuitous combination of factors has spawned a mind-boggling barrage of posters and handbills.”

“A functional spec is a document detailing the client’s requirements for an application. Typically, the client has a high level view of what they want the application to do and it is the job of the Functional Spec to take that high level view and provide the details of what it does, how it is used, and what it looks like. By creating a blueprint of the application first, time and productivity are saved during the development stage.”

“From the calligraphy schools of ancient China to the explosive new forms of David Carson, it’s clear that type is more than just a vehicle for conveying information to the user. If done right, type can be one of the most powerful tools for shaping the way an audience perceives written information, written information such as these very fiery-hot words you see before you.”