xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
20th February 2002

AdBasics

“What everyone should know about advertising: Clients, brand managers, and account directors will find this information useful, perhaps interesting. But it is written by and for creative people, those of us who make ads, create marketing campaigns.”

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20th February 2002

Graphic Design from the 1920s and 1930s in Travel Ephemera

“This is a virtual online gallery I’ve created to display and share the best items in my collection of 1920s and 1930s travel-related ephemera. Many friends and fellow collectors have asked to see the items in my collection so I figured, why not, I’ll build a website to display the best ones. Nothing on this website is for sale, it is purely an online gallery. My basic passion is paper items such as travel brochures, airline time-tables, ocean liner time-tables, auto road maps, luggage labels, advertising, and graphic design publications from the the 1920s and 1930s, primarily in Europe but also Asia and, to a small degree, the U.S.A.”

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20th February 2002

Snazzy layout makes document accessible

“President Bush’s sales pitch for his $2.13 trillion proposed budget pulls out all the stops, visually, with full-color photographs, lively graphics and color-coded program scorecards. A waving American flag in vibrant red, white and blue bedecks the front cover of the 426-page document submitted to Congress yesterday. It’s a far cry from the usual drab, single-color presentation of tables. Hardly a page goes by without a snatch of color to help bring the parade of numbers to life.”

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20th February 2002

Empathic Instructional Design

“Critics of e-learning are quick to point out that many course offerings are nothing but digital page-turners. Some refer to the act of taking an e-learning course as ‘e-reading.’ Many reasons are attributed to this prevalent condition — from time and budget constraints to limitations of traditional instructional design. We feel another important reason is the lack of exposure to alternative practices. In this article, we take cues from Interaction Design, Usability Engineering and Product Design on a process known as empathic design, a user-centered approach to design that can lead to innovative e-learning.”

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20th February 2002

Web Services Overview And How They Fit Into Your Future

“Web services is an emerging technology driven by the will to securely expose business logic beyond the firewall. Through Web services one can encapsulate existing business processes, publish them as services, search for and subscribe to other services, and exchange information throughout and beyond the enterprise. Web services will enable application-to-application e-marketplace interaction, removing the inefficiencies of human intervention. Although there are many opinions as to what constitutes a ‘Web service,’ each definition shares some common ground; Markup Language components transported over the Internet via HTTP. IBM says, ‘Web services are self-contained, modular applications that can be described, published, located, and invoked over a network, generally, the World Wide Web.’”

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