Thinking Visually
I want to use more illustrations and other graphics in our documentation. Graphics can help clarify ideas that are hard to understand from textual explanations, they can add useful redundancy to the communication, and they provide more learning channels. Plus they're often fun to look at.
The documentation I've worked on hasn't used graphics or art much, so I'm not used to thinking visually. That's not a Microsoft thing, it's more the style of the individual writers (like me) who generally think in words. In fact, Developer Division User Education has a designer/artist, Monique Bailey, who creates art for the docs (among her other design duties). To get a better understanding of this important area, I met with Monique to talk about how to turn concepts and ideas into pictures.
This podcast is 7.16 MB in size, and is 10 minutes, 25 seconds long.
Comments
- Anonymous
July 27, 2006
Graphic artists and designers are an important part of documentation, but until lately I didn't look... - Anonymous
August 15, 2006
Recently I had to do my own art (at another company). Most of their existing Visio stuff was miserably overwhelmed by text. And the graphics were enormous, too, spanning pages! Art is best when it's painfully simple. People need imagery they can hold on to when reading explanatory text. Blurring the two into one complex an annotated graphic is Not the best plan. Yet that's exactly what happens when geeks use Visio. - Anonymous
August 14, 2007
The comment has been removed