“This paper is the keynote address given at the Web-Wise 2003 Conference on Thursday, February 27, 2003 in Washington, D.C.” (Robert Coonrod – First Monday 8.5)

“Creating web applications that support the full and valid completion of specific tasks, operations, and database transactions, require some understanding of how to manipulate the medium to that purpose.” (Bob Baxley – Boxes and Arrows)

“Writing effective design documentation (like design itself) is really all about making sure you serve the needs of your audience.” (Ryan Olshavsky – Boxes and Arrows)

“As information designers, we should place importance on the design process and not hyper-focus on the tools we use to achieve it.” (Judy McFarland – Thread Inc.)

“Written language is just a particular case of visual language. In fact there are many visual languages that appear to share common rules. Thinking about the visual language can help us to convey our messages in a more effective way.” (Juan C. Dürsteler – Inf@Vis!)

“It will always be easier to rally a group of people who work in the same building, but you can accomplish just as much (or more) with a motivated remote team. Getting team members motivated in the first place and holding their interest are your goals. Here are fifteen quick and useful tips to get you started.” (Indy Young – Adaptive Path)

“In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now ‘slideware’ computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year. Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?” (Edward R. Tufte) – courtesy of lee potts

“Although design is one of the most profoundly powerful disciplines in our modern information culture, its identity as a profession is in a state of incoherent disarray verging on crisis. The economic slowdown and tenuous world situation provide us an opportunity to come together as designers to articulate and organize our professional culture, to enhance our recognition and prestige within the context of an increasingly design-reliant information economy and to wield our influence in ways that will benefit humanity and the planet.” (Clement Mok – Communication Arts) – courtesy of beth mazur

“We need to better integrate copywriting into the overall creative process. Copywriting and graphic design – the creation of words and pictures – need to develop using a collaborative process. Design should be a collaborative effort between copywriting and graphic design.” (Josh Alkire – Thread Inc.)

“Repeat it until you accept it: business goals, business goals, business goals.” (Dirk Knemeyer)

Presentation downloads (DIHNet)

“If you’re not the type to pay attention to the comments, I encourage you to make an exception. Dirk Knemeyer has provided two very interesting responses to my ‘What’s in a name?’ post of a few days ago and my subsequent response to him.” (Beth Mazur – IDblog)

“(…) ID provides guidance to all of the ‘production disciplines’ (no condescension intended or implied) – IA, graphic design, variety of different programming approaches in application development, experience design as some of the more linear examples – without being a production discipline itself.” (Dirk Knemeyer)

“Both require different skills. Information architects come from a variety of backgrounds, but I sense that a majority of them display an orientation toward language. Information designers, on the other hand, tend to be oriented toward the visual arts. As a result, the majority of information designers come from exactly one discipline: graphic design.” (Clark MacLeod – Kelake)

“(…) information design is what happens when you take the visual world of the graphic designer and integrate it with the textual world of the tech writer. Go figure. Like Wurman says, you make the complex clear.” (Beth Mazur – IDblog)

“When a company decides to globalize its site, the Web team often learns the taboo colors and appropriate dress codes of a given culture, translates the text, and launches. But cultural differences run deeper than visual appearance or language; they reflect strong values. Rarely do globalized sites incorporate the nuances of a culture’s social hierarchy, individualism, gender roles, time-orientation, or truth-seeking attributes.” (Aaron Marcus – New Architect)

“Participants versus Guests versus Users – the common thread (…) in recent articles is the fact that we live in a customer-centric world.” (Wendy Kadens – Thread Inc.)

“I’ve become a big fan of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and the Web Credibility Project. Their studies regarding how people evaluate a web site’s credibility show the critical importance of information design and structure. Users trust sites that are well-designed and well-organized. Poor navigation is the key element that decreases earned web credibility.” (Peter Morville – Semantic Studios)

“Poynter Online would like to showcase the efforts of visual journalists as they help readers find clarity. (…) a place to share ideas and processes as we continue to improve the graphics we create.” (Poynter Online) – courtesy of iaslash

“Embedded deep within the psychic of the traditional organization is the view of content as an historical record. This view sees content as describing an event that has occurred. Web content is a driver of the event. Web content is action-oriented. That’s the big shift and many organizations have not graspe.” (Gerry McGovern)