From Interactivity By Design: Creating & Communicating with New Media by Ray Kristof and Amy Satran (1995, Adobe Press; ISBN 1568302215; Amazon | B&N.com) TEXT FEATURE PAPER WORLD SCREEN WORLD Size High-resolution commercial typesetting systems produce crisp, easy-to-read type at all sizes. Eight-point and smaller text is common, with 8,10, and 11-point the most common sizes for… Read More »
From Interactivity By Design: Creating & Communicating with New Media by Ray Kristof and Amy Satran (1995, Adobe Press; ISBN 1568302215; Amazon | B&N.com) Critical Tasks of Information Design Define goals for the product Define what the audience wants to do Decide how the product will reach its audience Choose the authoring tool Create a content inventory… Read More »
Almost all of the notes for this lecture are derived from the book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Site by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville (1998, O’Reilly & Associates; ISBN 1402874545; Amazon | B&N.com) Information architecture can loosely be defined as organizing content, especially organizing into classifications, and creating a labeling system… Read More »
From Rocking the Ages by J. Walker Smith and Ann Clurman (1998, HarperCollins Publishers; ISBN 0887309003;Amazon | B&N.com) The following table is based on the thesis that each generation’s values were determined by the events, influences and attitudes of that generation’s formative years – teen-age years to early adulthood. MATURES BOOMERS X’ERS Defining Idea Duty Individuality… Read More »
From Alison J. Head’s DesignWise: A Guide for Evaluating the Interface Design of Information Resources (1999, Information Age Books; ISBN 0-910965-31-5; Amazon | B&N.com) Individual pages of a site have a consistent and simple layout so that users with visual impairments or blind users using screen readers can more quickly navigate through a page and find the… Read More »
From Robin William’s The Non-Designer’s Design Book (1994, Peachpit Press; ISBN 1566091594;Amazon | B&N.com) Contrast The idea behind contrast is to avoid elements on the page that are merely similar. If the elements (type, color, size, line thickness, shape, space, etc.) are not the same, then make them very different. Contrast is often the most important visual… Read More »
From Alison J. Head’s DesignWise: A Guide for Evaluating the Interface Design of Information Resources (1999, Information Age Books; ISBN 0-910965-31-5; Amazon | B&N.com) To ask about the resource: What main tasks does the resource support? What level of users is the resource aimed at? Is the resource a tool for users with specific expertise (e.g. professional… Read More »
From Interactivity By Design: Creating & Communicating with New Media by Ray Kristof and Amy Satran (1995, Adobe Press; ISBN 1568302215; Amazon | B&N.com)
This syllabus was written in the fall of 2000 for a journalism course taught by former UW-Oshkosh Department of Journalism adjunct faculty member Matthew Stanton. Note that many of the recommend links below now go to dead sites, but are included here for reference back on the coursework of the time. SUMMARY: Spring 2001 instruction… Read More »
From the Wikipedia entry: Memes, analogously to genes, vary in their aptitude to replicate; successful memes remain and spread, whereas unfit ones stall and are forgotten. Thus memes that prove more effective at replicating and surviving are selected in the meme pool. Memes first need retention. The longer a meme stays in its hosts, the… Read More »