xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
13th February 2003

Why Creative Problem Solving?

“Only one judgmental comment like those above can kill innovation. But out-of-the-box thinking is urgently needed at all levels in an organization because of heightened competition, accelerated technological development, extremely short product life cycles, diminishing returns from present methods, management fashions that did not work, and the shift to creating value with knowledge instead of material.”

posted in Creativity | Permalink | Comments Off

13th February 2003

Graphics Front and Center

“Examples of compelling visual and interactive techniques in print and online: As we build our front page gallery of Sunday morning front pages, I get a chance to see all the good work newsrooms are producing. One thing that stands out is the use of infographics on the front page.”

posted in Information graphics | Permalink | Comments Off

13th February 2003

Graphics Front and Center

“Examples of compelling visual and interactive techniques in print and online: As we build our front page gallery of Sunday morning front pages, I get a chance to see all the good work newsrooms are producing. One thing that stands out is the use of infographics on the front page.”

posted in Journalism | Permalink | Comments Off

13th February 2003

The Power of Maps

“I think that if space is deed the ‘final frontier’ then we are all in big trouble — at least in so far as social and political theory go. Perhaps the contemporary shift to metaphors of space as modes of intelligibility is architecture’s triumph — the conquest of dense urban spaces and inhabited building by the principle of open space.”

posted in Mapping | Permalink | Comments Off

13th February 2003

Breadcrumb Navigation: An Exploratory Study of Usage

“Just as Hansel and Gretel created a breadcrumb trail to find their path back home, today’s internet user often finds a need to get back to a website’s previously visited locations; hence, the cyber ‘breadcrumb trail’ was created. This textual representation of where and how information is located within the website allows the user to link to major categories of information along a continuum of sequential order. For example, the breadcrumb path for a leather chair on the Office Max website would be: Home > Furniture > Chairs > Leather Chairs. The location of the navigational path is often prominently placed in the upper left quarter of the website page.”

posted in Usability | Permalink | Comments Off