I’m going to step away from visual communication for a moment today and share a few thoughts on seizing the moment. Each of us, in our own unique way, has a collection of talents and perspectives that, if intentionally harnessed and shared, can change the world for good. Sometimes that
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By Evie Harrison Guest Contributor Today, everything is digital. Those days are gone when you could run a business without being present online. Now, having a website is a must. However, merely having a website is not enough. The site also needs to be visually appealing and optimized. A study
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When it comes to writing, designing, and communicating, don’t be a scatterbrain—stay organized! If you can be strategic about your organizational structure, you’ll be in a far better position to persuade, influence, and generally wow your audience. Wow-ing starts with conscious awareness about how your ideas progress, how they’re connected, and how
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At the most fundamental level, successful communications must grab a person’s attention. But attracting someone’s attention doesn’t necessarily happen automatically—rather, attention is a commodity you earn from people by resonating with how they reason, how they feel, and how they subconsciously react. Effective attention-grabbing requires that you, the architect, understand
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Anybody can create information. Successful communicators design information. My information design rule for the day? Become an information architect and construct user experiences—every time you put words on a page, screen, or slide. When we design information—be it in a resume, report, PowerPoint, white paper, sales pitch, text book, social
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The information design rule I’m capturing today is critical: design for how people feel. Even in business and professional settings, it’s important we get in touch with our feelings. Or, more importantly, it’s important we understand how our audiences’ feelings will be affected by what we create. It’s not uncommon
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People like pictures. A lot. And there is overwhelming research-based evidence to suggest that it’s not just a personal preference or that it is a cultural phenomenon. The human brain loves pictures. It processes pictures faster than any other form of communication and it remembers pictures far, far more than
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It’s not exactly news anymore: people just don’t read like they used to. To be an effective writer-communicator these days, we need to learn how to adapt. In the olden days, we used to sit and read the same piece of content for extended periods of time (and by “extended,”
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You’re a business professional. And, perhaps unexpectedly, your job requires you to create communication designs all the time–PowerPoint presentations, data visualizations, sales reports, user’s manuals, web pages, instructions, marketing collateral, fliers, business cards, you name it. But chances are pretty good that, unless you specifically took courses in graphic design
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If you’re writing any kind of paper—essay, report, legal document, proposal, etc.—and you reference ideas that are not original to you, you need to be citing your sources. Citing sources gives credit to the people who developed original ideas and research. Citing sources will keep you from plagiarizing and help
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