Information Design Links
Below are a series of useful links of interest to information designers.
There's a top-notch information design weblog at: www.xplane.com/xblog/
Mike Lee's Daily Information Design weblog is a wealth of information, and worth visiting the archives again and again: www.visuallee.com/weblog/
Another great ID weblog is run by Beth Mazur: http://idblog.org/
Here's the home page of the Society for Technical Communications (STC) Information Design Special Interest Group (SIG): www.stcsig.org/id/
One of my favorite sites shows a new way to design information - in this case, a thesaurus. Give this one a few minutes to load, then launch it. You'll be impressed! www.visualthesaurus.com/online/index.html
The mother of all technical writing and technical communication sites is the EServer Technical Communications Library at http://tc.eserver.org/
Thom Haller has put together a great set of links to Information Architecture resources.
An excellent resource for information from the world of graphic design is creativepro.com . Here you can find reviews, how-tos, stock photography, all the fonts in the world, an excellent newsletter, plus vast archives. Check it out: http://www.creativepro.com
You'll find a wealth of articles on information architecture at: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/
For excellent examples of infographics and "visual journalism", along with explanations, see: www.poynter.org
Learn about color theory at the same site: www.poynter.org
We design information for one reason - to make it more usable. Usable information is information used to perform a task, which means that effective information design is performance-oriented. But before we can create an effective performance intervention, we must carefully analyze what factors are affecting performance in our target audience. Here's a useful tool for conducting that analysis: Factors Affecting Performance
To learn more about designing forms, including Web forms, go to www.formsthatwork.com
A good site with many articles discussing Website usability is www.uie.com/moreart.htm
This is a good site for articles on building usability into Website and software design: www.foruse.com
Jacob Neilson determines the letter "c" is unusable: http://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/07/letter_c.html
For thoughts on a unified theory of the design of interactivity, visit www.nathan.com/thoughts/unified/
AIFIA is a professional association for information architects: www.aifia.org/
Some excellent articles on the meaning of information design: http://designforum.aiga.org/
More articles on information architecture: www.boxesandarrows.com/
Here is IBM's take on designing the user experience: www-3.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/Publish/1996
Suggest a good link by writing us at: info@documen.com
Thanks!
