From the Doc Side : visual communication

Google's Chrome Comic Book Documentation

Lindsey Robbins — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:56:00 GMT

The buzz in the online world the past few weeks is about Google's new Internet browser Chrome. In the Technical Communication world, the buzz is around Google's choice to create a help book to explain Chrome. Why the buzz? Well it was done in comic format. I'm not exactly sure why the rest of the Technical Communication world is up in arms. I thought it was a fun play on documentation and not meant to be the complete resource on *how to* use chrome. To understand this momentous project causing all the rage, I naturally turned to our own Blackbaud Technical Writer, Steve Stegelin. Most of you may not know it, but Steve started his career as a cartoonist and technical illustrator. In the meantime he's done some pretty impressive work (on non-Blackbaud hours). Lately, you can find him several places.

Charleston City Paper - Weekly Cartoon, Blotter, Special Covers
SC Statehouse Report - Weekly Cartoon
Illustrated a Book - I'll Be Sober in the Morning: Great Political Comebacks, Putdowns, & Ripostes
And he even generously donates his time to some in-house projects including designing t-shirts, adding illustrative touches to our quarterly company newsletter, and the occasional greeting card.

In our cube this morning (yup, I'm the fortunate one who sits with Steve every day), I asked him a few questions about this Google Chrome thing. I wanted to get to the bottom of the hoopla.

Lindsey :
Why is this Google Chrome comic such a big deal?

Steve:
While it's obviously a good bit of marketing gimmickry to promote Chrome, I think it's a great method to explain just what makes it so different from the other browsers out there. Having Scott McCloud use caricatures of the various developers and designers to pass along the message also really helps give it a personal voice, which is a bit of genius, making it less about the corporate Google than about the team of individuals working to make Chrome succeed. With the open source-ness of Chrome, communicating in this way really helps promote its "by the people for the people" message. And as a fan of the comic medium, it's actually quite validating to see the format promoted as such a "legitimate" form of communication by a corporation such as Google.

Lindsey:
Who's Scott McCloud and why should we know him?

Steve:
When I first started reading comics, Scott was the creator of the fun indie comic "Zot!" He's since gone on to become the closest thing comics has to a "resident scholar" on the sequential art form. You may've seen his theses as graphic novels: "Understanding Comics", "Reinventing Comics", and "Making Comics." Each is an entertaining and informative analysis of the comics medium, from the role of the reader, artist, and historian/forecaster. In particular, I think "Understanding Comics" is an invaluable read, not just for comics but for any type of communication of sequence to an audience… I find myself applying some of the thought discussed in that book to my own procedural writing in our user guides, to great effect.

Lindsey:
Are you ready to do the entire Raiser's Edge documentation set in comic form? ;-)

Steve:
LOL. That might take a while…

Here's a sample of the book:

Jumpcut - Online Video Editing Tool

Lindsey Robbins — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:50:00 GMT

Now that our team’s Docs Day 2008 (team training day) is over, I can start sharing all the fun surprises I had for them in my presentation. I presented on my trip to the Society for Technical Communication Summit in June. I’ll be posting reviews on each presentation I went to as I promised in an earlier post. In the meantime, I wanted to share a fun new tool I used for the lunch time entertainment.

I found this site – Jumpcut http://www.jumpcut.com

Jumpcut is a website that makes adding, editing, and sharing video online easy. In 2006, the company was acquired by Yahoo but I don't think it's taken away from this fun, feature rich site. For me, the easy to use editing part was the reason I chose this site. I had embarrassing footage of me doing the Rocky impersonation in Philadelphia and wanted to add the Gonna Fly Now music to create a silly video of me for my team to laugh at. Then when I started playing on the site it was easy to add photos, more music, and transitions. The only issue I came across was trying to figure out how to transition the music. Also cool, people can remix your video or you can give them permission to edit. The features are all easy to use and the learning curve isn’t that steep. In the end, you have a **free** video you can share with others.

At risk of further embarrassment, I’ll post the video here. Warning – it is 8 minutes long! (I got a little out of control). Also, in the beginning I was making fun of the opening session by posting a picture of each person who presented something before the keynote speaker. It just went on and on! Once you get past those though, it’s all pictures of how much fun I had in Philly.

Enjoy a good laugh on me!

A Great Visual Communication Resource - Worldmapper

Lindsey Robbins — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:45:00 GMT

This post is a little off topic from documentation but it's a great resource I came across from my alma mater's listserv.

Introducing... Worldmapper! http://www.worldmapper.org

According to their website, "Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest… There are now nearly 600 maps."

Did you read what I read? 600 maps for us to click around, play with, and in general become more aware about the world we live in. I especially recommend you spend some time learning a bunch of cool things in the Map Categories section.

366 of the maps are available as PDF posters. This is definitely a great resource if you need a visual to communicate an important point.

Here's an example of a map based on total population…

And another example, based on road traffic deaths…

I guess the traffic in Charleston doesn't seem so bad now.