Friday, October 16, 2009

Blogworld 09 - Creating Great Visuals

David Armano gave a talk on adding cool stuff to your blog post. The description can be found here. Here are my notes:

  • "The eyes are not reponsible when the mind does the seeing" - Publilius Syrus.

  • Dave went through a lot of good examples of how important visuals are to conveying information.

  • It's important to present information in a very simple way so that people can grasp the concept immediately. It's a messy process to get to a simple diagram, but don't worry about that. The process to get to simplicity is complex. Simple visuals have the ability to grab your attention.

  • Mindmap got a plug. I've always enjoyed mind manager, but I think it's got some serious limitations when it comes to posting information on the web.

  • 6 steps to getting visual.

    1. Empathize: See the world as a child.

    2. Memorize: Commit thoughts to memory. Draw out your ideas.

    3. Analyze: Take a step back.

    4. Synthesize: Filter signal from noise. This is crucial and it's where most people fail.

    5. Visualize: See it, then do it. David uses Adobe Illustrator to do his visuals.

    6. Materialize: Make it tangible, make it stick. Make it something that grabs people and they take note of what you created.
  • Dave went through a concrete example of a visual he made for HiveMind that went through these steps. It was excellent, but difficult to replicate here.

  • The wrong question is what software he uses - Adobe Illustrator, the right question is how he goes through the process of developing the visuals. He admitted that Adobe Illustrator has a steep learning curve. He claimed he could have done the HiveMind graphic in Gliffy or PowerPoint as well.

  • He recommended Tufte's Envisioning Information, Gray's Selling to the VP of No and Krug's Don't Make Me Think.
Here, David is preparing to take a photo of the audience, probably to use it as a great visual later on!

3 comments:

meemsnyc said...

There are some good ideas on his list.

K T Cat said...

meemsync, David gave a great presentation. He spent a lot of it fighting his Mac, which had decided to gag on all kinds of things and he was terribly embarrassed by that, but he needn't have been. He walked us through that process on two wonderful corporate images he had made and it all made sense. I'm certainly going to try it in the future.

Gee Why said...

Krug's Don't Make Me Think is a classic!