XPLANE continues to grow and we’re looking for project managers for the Portland and Atlanta offices. You can find job descriptions at http://www.xplane.com/#/careers/.

Check out this new video from XPLANE, demonstrating the impact of mobile marketing. If you’d like to share via mobile devices, use this link: http://www.canalwap.com/xplane/.

“Tony Karrer wrote a post VizThink and Visual Thinking and Learning: Still not sure last week. It’s in reference to a conversation he was having with Tom Crawford, the CEO of VizThink about whether it would be valuable for e-learning professionals to attend the conference he is organizing in January.

Several of us who are facilitating at the conference responded, and a very interesting conversation developed… Dave Gray has been a leader in this field for many years, and his company Xplane has opened an office here in Portland. Dave joined in the conversation with Tony, and since he is a featured facilitator at the VizThink conference, Tom Crawford arranged for Dave and Tony to have an expanded discussion in a free webinar.”

• Topic: How is Visual Thinking Related to eLearning?
• Guests: Tony Karrer & Dave Gray
• Date: Thursday, December 20th, 2008
• Time: 8am Pacific, 10am Central, 4pm GMT
• Cost: FREE

“Bringing together leaders in visual thinking for the first time in one location, the VizThink ‘08 Conference (http://www.vizthink.com) is an opportunity for executives to understand ways of incorporating visualization processes into business, learning and communications strategies to gain faster and more effective results. Hosted by Portland, Ore. based VizThink LLC, the conference will include breakout sessions and forums facilitated by some of the most recognized names in the visual thinking space, including the distinguished Bob Horn from Stanford University, renowned author and artist Scott McCloud, award winning designer Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design, most notably known for her work in Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, and Nigel Holmes formerly with Time magazine. The conference will be held at the Westin San Francisco Market Street Hotel from January 27-29. Registration (http://www.vizthink.com/reg.html) is open now.”

Perfunctory public notice: On this day in 1999 xBlog started broadcasting to the world. This is the 6,000th item added to this visual thinking linkblog.

By winter 1999 the idea had been stirring for at least year, inspired by Camworld, Kottke, Rebecca’s Pocket, peterme and a handful of others. I built some prototypes but never put them online. But once I started working full-time at XPLANE I knew had I found the perfect home for these design/web/communication/etc links.

With the help of Jeff Lash, xBlog became a great linkblog. For eight years it’s been filled with almost daily links to what used to be scarce online visual resources. Those online resources aren’t so scarce now — in fact they’re everywhere. So xBlog’s function as a filter is still useful, but we’re going to take it up a few notches in 2008. Lots of notches.

xBlog’s linkblog component will still be here but I’m looking to start sharing much, much more. Good. XPLANE. Stuff. And trust me — we’ve got lots of good stuff to share.

“As Dave outlined previously, running a Visual Thinking School (VTS) style event isn’t all that difficult, some supplies (pen & paper), a space and idea will go a long ways. That said, I’m sure some of you are thinking ‘Sounds great, but a party of one isn’t going to be very fun.’ …The reality is these events have grown through word of mouth using a few free tools online. In this post I’ll outline some of the tools I’ve made use of to help promote the events and hopefully help you connect with the visual thinkers amongst us.”

UPDATE: Early registration has been extended to 24 Oct to allow our corporate customers enough time to get budget approval!

VizThink is a visual thinking conference and XPLANE is proud to be part of it. It happens Jan 27-29 in San Francisco and these are just some of the folks lined up to speak and facilitate:

Scott McCloud
Nigel Holmes
Christine Martells
Neil Cohn
Nancy Duarte
David Sibbet
Eileen Clegg
Robert Horn
Stephen Few
Dave Gray
Karl Gude
Dan Rose

Who are visual thinkers? Visual thinkers are people who use graphic design, images, pictures, video, animations, sketches, and other forms of visual art for communications and learning. VizThink will bring together several hundred participants from the best of the best in our industry with participation by trainers, marketers, presenters, executives, planners, strategists, and managers, just to name a few. While each approach may be different, the attendees all share the same philosophy in the power of visualization for learning and communication. We believe that by bringing these diverse groups together, we’ll create a community that can take the industry to a new level and invite you to take part.

Take advantage of the early registration discount by heading over to VizThink.com now!

This week, the newly formed XPLANE Press achieved its first milestone: The reprinting of Bob Horn’s classic book Visual Language. Horn’s book makes the case that visual language is truly an emerging international language, and – like all languages – it has an inherent order, syntax, and grammar that can be learned and applied. While the world of information design has come a long way in the 10 years since Visual Language was first published, the book’s core message remains relevant today.

Visual Language has been out of print for the last few years, but is now back on the market via the XPLANE store. We will soon be offering it on Amazon as well, where used copies have been selling for upwards of $100. Here’s more from XPLANE founder Dave Gray.

“We look at a lot of Ajax applications, and we have seen a lot of trends over the last couple of years. In general we are maturing, but as complexity has gone up in Ajax applications we are seeing one scary trend. The first set of apps simply added some <script> that did some happy XMLHttpRequest dancing. Then we abstracted to libraries such as Dojo and Prototype. Then people tried to do the right thing and use unobtrusive JavaScript where we keep the HTMl structure separate from the code. We would all like to see more of this. Unfortunately, we are starting to see Ajax applications that look more like Flash web pages…” (Thanks SuccessForce!)

btw, you can see some work XPLANE has been doing for Salesforce over at the Successforce blog.

Into Campfire, that is. I just noticed that the screenshot over at 37 Signals’ Campfire site has one of our XPLANATiONS pasted into the sample chat. How cool!

“I’ve had trouble justifying my excitement about this intricate visual detail, so I thought it would be good to collect a bunch of examples from over fifty years of information design history, to show it as a powerful visual element in ubicomp situations.

Even though the dashed line has emerged from a designer’s shorthand and from the limitations of monotone printing techniques, it has a clear and simple visual magic, the ability to express something three- or four-dimensional in two dimensions.” (Thanks Stephen!)

Note: XPLANE founder Dave Gray is quoted in the post, which features an XPLANATiON worked on by yours truly!

I’m going to be offline for a week or so. xBlog will return shortly after 16 July. In the meantime, check out these fine folks with online publications: Coudal Partners, Conscientious, Drawn!, information aesthetics and Signal vs. Noise.

That’s right, XPLANE is hiring!

Check out this visual over at XPLANE founder Dave Gray’s blog: “Language is more than just communication, it is the primary method by which we do things together. Language is the accumulation of shared meaning — on common ground.”

Hey! I’m going to be the Guest Editor for the month of June over at coudal.com. My new book, “Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found,” just came out (more info here) and Jim Coudal was gracious enough to write the foreword of the book — I figured he’d perfect considering he’s the founder of the wonderful MoOM. And Coudaler Susan Everett contributed a great stack of lists. So, once again, a big thank you to the Coudal crew! I’m looking forward to a month of good linking.

Over at XPLANE founder Dave Gray’s blog we see some slides from Ryan Coleman talking about visual thinking: “Using a visual approach to facilitate the thought process.”