Information Squid

I’ll be going to Blogger Social in New York in a week, and in preparation I’ve been reading (and helping write) Steve Woodruff’s series of Socialite profiles. Now, for easy downloading, here are:

The 48-page full-size PDF (5MB) and the booklet PDF (4.8MB).

The booklet (courtesy of my new software toy CocoaBooklet) can be printed double-sided and stapled in the middle to make a cute little pocketable guide.

Enjoy!

My first post on my company’s blog: User Diaries in Community Software.

Many information architects come from a design background. Their deliverables are gorgeous, their blogs are pretty – and their presentations are Good PowerPoint (take a look at the IA Summit ones for examples). It’s a little intimidating for me, coming from a development background.

So I’m trying to learn – how to use designers’ tools and how to use them well.

Last week’s discovery was that InDesign is remarkably intuitive. Reading a book and playing with the software a bit was enough for me to feel confident I could create documents. Sure enough, when I mocked up a wireframe and compared it to the one by a designer colleague, all the bones were there. I still need to dissect a couple of good examples to learn nuances: “Oh, you made the shape outline and then put a text frame inside it instead of typing directly into the shape? That makes sense.” But it’s one more tool to have.