xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
16th May 2003

CSSEdit

“Cascading Style Sheets offer a unique way to control the look of your site. But while the the user sees a breath-taking web page, writing the underlying CSS code can be less enjoyable. CSSEdit changes this by allowing you to edit your colors, fonts, sizes, borders, etc in a refreshingly easy application.”

posted in CSS | Permalink | Comments Off

16th May 2003

Six Tips for Improving Your Design Documentation

“If you are a designer or product planner, you probably create documents of some kind to capture your design decisions and solutions. Documentation is a crucial component of successful product planning and implementation, so it’s important that it communicates as effectively as possible. Good organization, complete information, and clear writing are, of course, key to the success of any design document, but there are some other, less-obvious techniques you can use to make your documents more readable and understandable. Here are a few of them.”

posted in Information architecture | Permalink | Comments Off

16th May 2003

Instructional Design for Flow in Online Learning

“This tutorial describes how the instructional design of an online course can facilitate an optimal learning experience for the student. The optimal learning experience is the state termed ‘flow.’ Flow, as defined by creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is the ’state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.’”

posted in Interaction design | Permalink | Comments Off

16th May 2003

Six Tips for Improving Your Design Documentation

“If you are a designer or product planner, you probably create documents of some kind to capture your design decisions and solutions. Documentation is a crucial component of successful product planning and implementation, so it’s important that it communicates as effectively as possible. Good organization, complete information, and clear writing are, of course, key to the success of any design document, but there are some other, less-obvious techniques you can use to make your documents more readable and understandable. Here are a few of them.”

posted in Interaction design | Permalink | Comments Off

16th May 2003

Edward Tufte: The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

“In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall… the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?”

posted in Software/Hardware | Permalink | Comments Off

16th May 2003

Edward Tufte: The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

“In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall… the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?”

posted in Visual thinking | Permalink | Comments Off

16th May 2003

Deep Thinking about Weblogs

“Weblogs are everywhere… In the words of weblog conceiver and chief evangelizer, Dave Winer, ‘A Weblog allows you to easily publish a wide variety of content to the Web. You can publish written essays, annotated links, documents (Word, PDF, and PowerPoint files), graphics, and multimedia.’ To many this will sound a lot like a Geocities home page. Nothing new here…”

posted in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments Off