Tag Archives: Tech Comm

Technical communication

Bad, bad Halloween form.

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There are some places that probably shouldn’t include bloody hand prints in their Halloween office décor—for instance, an urgent care clinic.

I don’t know about you, but I go to the trauma center to get stitched up, not to spill what’s left of my blood all over the front windows.

By all means, decorate the office and get into the All Hallows’ Eve spirit. Just make sure to do it in a way that doesn’t instill even more fear into the injured people coming through the door for help.

(Photo courtesy of Val Williams)

The key to good creative work? Do a lot of it.

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Ira Glass of This American Life reassures creative types that frustration is normal early on. (Thanks to Maria Popova at Brain Pickings!)

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

David Shiyang Liu’s kinetic typography brings Glass’s words to life in a way that combines reading and hearing.

My favorite lines:

The most important possible thing you can do is to do a lot of work … because it’s only by going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap [between your expectations and the quality of your work].

What we create isn’t supposed to be brilliant when we first start out. It’s normal for our early work not to meet our expectations. Just as Anne Lamott counsels us, we have to get through the not-so-good material in order to discover the really good material.

I feel much better now.

Emergency instructions: A matter of life and death

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Concise, easy-to-understand instructions can mean the difference between success and failure—or even between life and death. In emergency situations, for instance, our reasoning abilities diminish. We just want to get out alive. Our brains are in crisis mode, not think-and-reflect mode.

When we create text to accompany life-saving equipment, it’s important that even terrified or badly injured people can understand it in a millisecond. How we phrase these brief instructions can determine whether our readers live or die.

Here’s a great example courtesy of my sister, who was traveling for work when she snapped these photos. Continue reading →

I’ll wash my own hands, thanks!

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Workplace signs are among the funniest I’ve seen. They almost never mean to cause confusion, but when they do, the result makes my day. Or makes me weep for humanity. Or both.

This one is courtesy of my sister, who saw it in a Denver area women’s restroom. Continue reading →

The Weather Channel’s new iPhone app: Darn near perfect

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In mid-April, I purchased my very first iPhone. The weather app that came with it was barely functional and looked like a mid-’90s NetScape refugee. I needed something that worked well and matched the sleek, efficient design of my iPhone. Why not the Weather Channel’s new (and free) iPhone app?

While I’d read some high praise for TWC’s new and improved iPhone app, I was still suspicious. Their far-too-busy local forecast page, another recent redesign, had me thinking the app would be a disaster. Thank goodness I was wrong!

Well, mostly wrong. Continue reading →

It’s called a dictionary. USE IT.

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For the second time this week—and I’m not sure how it happened, so please don’t point fingers, index or otherwise—I happened across this article on Yahoo! News [sic]. Boxer Floyd Mayweather is serving a 90-day jail sentence in Las Vegas for beating up and threatening his ex, with whom he has three children. Continue reading →

Web users want to read content. Who knew?

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The other day, I stumbled across this Who Knew? article from Yahoo! News [sic] on long-lasting celebrity marriages. Nothing in there surprised me—I already knew about Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman, Mark Harmon and Pam Dawber, et cetera.

No, what really gave me a laugh was the comments section.

Continue reading →

AS SEEN ON TV: Cuddle up with the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse!

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So we’ve got Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. Who’s missing?

Oh, right.

Behold the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Stupidity. Or maybe his name is Marketing Coup. I’m not sure. Continue reading →