Overview, with links and artifacts, of the print debate from a print designer's perspective.

Are we dumbing down processes that ought to be difficult? valuing ease at the cost of growth? heard it before, but this is a sloghtly different angle: " The goal of design should be to turn the most difficult into the most enjoyable. While nothing below is particularly new, they are still worth noting." : "

One for the anoraks from clivebillson. Thanks, Clive.

Looks at some affordances in weblogs that enable "a new literacy practice characterised by what Lankshear and Knobel call an “active sociality” (2006: 1). This “active sociality” is exemplified by modes of participation and displays of identity and affiliation that mark it out as significantly different from other forms of textual communication."

A little upset here on the visual side: designing texts for difficult reading: "disfluency – the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognitive operations – leads to deeper processing ... Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting. Study 2 extended this finding to high school classrooms. The results suggest that superficial changes to learning materials could yield significant improvements in educational outcomes."

by Rachel Lovinger. Early piece on content strategy and thinking about difference between copy and content

via techrhet Flash

Excellent overview article on change, especially for sense of modeling and IA and design: linear, slope, driver, attractor, dialectic. Doesn't cover change in organic networks.

Although the finished site looks nothing like a newspaper I think it has more in common with newspapers’ best features than most news websites do. The sense of browsing quickly through stories and reading the ones that catch your eye, feels similar.

Moleskine has gone hybrid with templates and generators to add print and web data to your journals.

Map of visual processing centers of the brain, and extension of Ware's ideas. Why droodles are more satisfying than doodles.

well-known principles: give both visual and auditory channels something to do, and reinforce the message with both. "When a presenter uses bullet-point slides, they’re not using both pathways as effectively as they could. The audience member has to read the words on the slide and listen to the presenter at the same time, leading to overloading of the language areas whilst leaving the visual cortex with very little to do."

Another critique of PPT. This one is interesting for the comments.

From ordering to unboxing to reading. I saved the article to Instapaper so I can read it later, in leisure, on my iPhone.

"I squeezed no new joy from these great books, though. The Gluyas Williams drawings were gone from the Benchley, and even the wasp passage in “Do Insects Think?” just wasn’t the same in Kindle gray. I did an experiment. I found the Common Reader reprint edition of “Love Conquers All” and read the very same wasp passage. I laughed: ha-ha. Then I went back to the Kindle 2 and read the wasp passage again. No laugh. Of course, by then I’d read the passage three times, and it wasn’t that funny anymore. But the point is that it wasn’t funny the first time I came to it, when it was enscreened on the Kindle. Monotype Caecilia was grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words."

A project in data collection and visualization by Nathan Yau, a statistics graduate student at UCLA. Use twitter to post data points <action> or <action> <value> to a direct twitter feed. Collect enough data entries and patterns begin to emerge. Visualizations are at <http://your.flowingdata.com/home/> Keep this project in sight. It's likely to be useful in classes, but it will also become news soon.

Martin Weller on six principles to keep in mind while designing networked instruction.
1. <embed> is the universal acid of the web – we should build around it.
2. Simple with reach trumps complex with small audience.
3. Sharing is a motivation to participation - so make it easy and rewarding to do.
4. Start simple and let others build on top
5. Providing limitations frames input (Cf twitter, 12seconds, etc)
6. Complexity resides in the network not the application

"the most tendentious part of Birkerts's argument has little to do with the Kindle or context. It's that he believes humanity would wittingly adopt deficient tools at the expense of effective ones. This fundamental cynicism is, to a point, understandable; much of marketing and advertising, after all, devotes itself to convincing us that what's new is necessarily superior ... But Birkerts underestimates, I think, the functional and aesthetic requisites of an average reader. If Heidegger is right, then the catastrophic, decontextualized info-culture of Birkerts's imagination is patently absurd -- readers won't, in the short- or long-term, shutter our libraries just because some novel, convenient alternative has asserted itself.

as adapted from A White - and just about every visual design text published

Promotional blog by Garr Reynolds on tradiional and contemporary professional presentations. Eschews the terms but is steeped in Socratic rhetoric turned towards the digital.

PPoint taken through cognitive load theory. Modalites of presentation. Glad this was posted. Trashing PP for poor use is two easy.

the study of computers as persuasive technology. The blog is the most interesting section.

companion piece to Card sorting: a definitive guide