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 writing course), some students marveled aloud that you could place three punctuation marks in a row–like when you
Read more
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. Apostrophes are for possession (my dog’s Christmas stocking) and for omitting letters (it’s time to open presents).
Read more
Home > Speaking > POWERFUL Presentations Presenting information to a crowd in way that engages, inspires, and moves audiences to act is an art form. If you can learn to present powerfully, you can teach, motivate, persuade and help people remember your most important ideas. The good news is, becoming
Read more
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 will look for creative approaches to old ideas (like how awesome this cool Martin Luther King mural is, made entirely
Read more
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 that matter) and I didn’t have a clue where to
Read more
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 that the design of stuff should be built around precisely what it is used for and how people use it. Chairs,
Read more
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 chromostereopsis, makes our eyes want to turn a 2D image into something 3D.
Read more
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 old adage coined by the master Leonardo Da Vinci: “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Read more
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 women to sell their content. Please allow me quickly to
Read more
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 brackets and squigglies and letters with circles around them–it’s obvious she has a
Read more