All posts tagged
documentation

Designing documents for people to use

Added on 28 June 2018 Peter Bogaards

Essays, posts and messages. All types of documents needed to be designed for use.

“This article reports on the work of Communication Research Institute (CRI), an international research center specializing in communication and information design. With the support of government, regulators, industry bodies, and business—and with the participation of people and their advocates—CRI has worked on over 200 public document design projects since it began as a small unit in 1985. CRI investigates practical methods and achievable standards for designing digital and paper public documents, including forms; workplace procedural notices; bills, letters, and emails sent by organizations; labels and instructions that accompany products and services; and legal and financial documents and contracts. CRI has written model grammars for the document types it designs, and the cumulative data from CRI projects has led to a set of systematic methods for designing public-use documents to a high standard. Through research, design, publishing, and advocacy, CRI works to measurably improve the ordinary documents we all have to use.”

David Sless a.k.a. /david-sless | @davidsless ~ She Ji 4.2 ★

Creating style guides

Added on 8 April 2014 Peter Bogaards

Documenting design decisions is a honorable piece of work.

“(…) a style guide is a living document of code, which details all the various elements and coded modules of your site or application. Beyond its use in consolidating the front-end code, it also documents the visual language, such as header styles and color palettes, used to create the site. This way, it’s a one-stop place for the entire team—from product owners and producers to designers and developers—to reference when discussing site changes and iterations. Several companies have even put their guides online; Starbucks is the most well known of the bunch, but others exist.”

(Susan Robertson a.k.a. @susanjrobertson ~ A List Apart)

The lady and the antelope: Suzanne Briet’s contribution to the French Documentation Movement

Added on 2 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
Remarkable woman in the Paul Otlet trajectory.

“During her thirty years at the Bibliothèque Nationale (BN), Suzanne Briet (1894-1989) made important theoretical, organizational, and institutional contributions to the documentation movement in France. This paper attempts to place her documentation work within the context of the far-reaching reform of French libraries, with special attention to the transformation of the BN. Like her colleagues in special libraries, Briet embraced modernity and science. However, because of her strong orientation toward humanistic scholarship, she viewed documentation service and bibliographic orientation as an enhancement rather than a rejection of the scholarly traditions of the national library. This paper will focus on her efforts to integrate the innovative ideas of the documentation movement into the practice of librarianship at the Bibliothèque Nationale.”

(Mary Niles Maack)