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Why We Like Target Better than Walmart: It’s a Visual Thing
Do we like shopping at Target more because it is more visually appealing?I recently taught a class entitled “Information Design in Society,” where we talk about the design of public spaces. In the...
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Thesaurus of the Seven Basic Emotions: 308 Ways to Describe How You Feel
Regardless of race, ethnicity, or cultural upbringing, did you know that all human beings contract the same muscles in the face for seven different emotions? In other words, angry people in Japan have...
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Ten Awesome Sculptures and Statues for Your Halloween Pleasure
On Halloween, we frequently seek the mysterious, the spooky, and even the gruesome. Sculptors around the globe have an awesome ability to creatively capture such emotion-provoking scenarios. For this...
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The Proofreader’s Marks
Have you ever looked at a paper that your teacher handed you back, with her scribbles in red ink all over the page asking you to revise, and you didn’t have a clue what she meant? You’re seeing...
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Women, I Need Your Help: Is It Ethical to Watch CNN?
Dear Women,I need your help. I need to know if it is ethical for me to get my daily news from national media news outlets like CNN and Fox News when they use images that openly objectify and degrade...
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Design Principle: Horror Vacui (or, a “fear of white space”)
Document design theories these days (whether from experts or novices) seem to have a running theme: keep it simple and keep it clean. Steve Jobs made a career out of this idea, literally living by the...
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Design Principle: Chromostereopsis (Or Why Blue on Red Doesn’t Work)
Don’t ever design blue text on a red background. Ever. And don’t put green on red, either. If the image below doesn’t give you reason enough not to, I don’t know what will. A visual phenomenon, called...
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Design Principle: Aesthetic-Usability Effect
There’s an old saying in industrial design (the field of engineering where designers make day-to-day stuff, like potato peelers and hedge trimmers): “form follows function.” This basic idea suggests...
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Design Principle: Anthropomorphic Form (Or, Why We Buy Stuff that Has a Human...
I still remember when I moved away to college and, for the first time in my life, I was in charge of choosing my own shampoo. It was a purchase decision I had never thought about (or cared about, for...
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Use Math to Make Better Logo Designs: The Propositional Density Principle
When most people think about evaluating the effectiveness of a design, they think in terms of aesthetics. They will scrutinize color schemes and layouts and typography and photographic acuity. And they...
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How to Give a Powerful Presentation: Eight Steps to an Awesome Speech
Presenting information to a crowd is an art form. Presenting information powerfully is a talent that can change the trajectory of your entire career. Some people are natural at swooning an audience...
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Christmas Card Announcement: Apostrophes DO NOT Go with Last Names
Every Christmas I see it. Multiple times. And every Christmas I remain politely in silence. But this year I’m speaking out: no more apostrophes on family names in Christmas cards.It’s a baffling trend....
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How Many Punctuation Marks Can You Accurately Place in Row?
In a recent course I was teaching, and in what turned into a somewhat off-topic, lighthearted discussion on punctuation (these are the kinds of conversations that may occur in a college business...
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Does Your Favorite Color Define Your Personality?
College Match Up recently published an infographic that shows the relationship between color preferences and personality. While the validity of the infographic is certainly up for debate, the fact that...
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Why Spelling Is Hard: The Chaos Poem Says It All
Read these five words out loud: “rough,” “cough,” “bough,” “dough,” and “through.” Now ask yourself, does the pronunciation of those words and their spelling make any logical sense whatsoever? Has it...
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Make Your Boring Documents Look Professional in 5 Easy Steps
When you’re given the task to write a report or an essay, do you just stick to the defaults? (You know, like sticking with Calibri, 11-pt. font?) If you’re like most regular folks (meaning, you don’t...
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You Can Use a Picture If: Guidelines for Image Copyrights
A couple years ago, I published a flowchart on image copyright best practices that followed the question, “Can I Use that Picture?” While that chart has been widely distributed and used in schools,...
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What Does Your Font Choice Say about You (and your document)?
Font choice matters. Beyond just transforming the entire feel of a document, the font you choose actually says a lot about you, too. Do you always stick with the defaults (like Calibri and Times New...
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How to Use Apostrophes (Infographic)
As I passed a billboard this week, telling me the “do’s and dont’s” of something or other–I can’t even recall what the billboard was about because I was so distracted by the error–I was reminded how...
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Millions of Americans Think HTML is a Sexually Transmitted Disease (and other...
A coupons website, Vouchercloud.net, recently surveyed nearly 2,400 adults across this great county to learn how much Americans know about technology. The L.A. Times reported the humorous and rather...
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