time bandits

As an Interactive Producer, it is my job to help people communicate. The message may be deep / brief / large-audience / silly / etc. You get the idea… the message could be anything, the challenge is shaping it to be received well by the intended audience. And if the message is delivered well, then hopefully a conversation will ensue as the audience responds, and ideas / loyalty / relationships are shared.

You know what, it’s a great gig. If you are a friend of mine, you could attest to the fact that I can be a bit chatty. I’m not ashamed, I like stories and odds are that on any given day I may share 37 of them, give or take twenty.

This week, two terrific articles on communicating well via the web have been passed on to me, and true to form, I’m blabbing about them here. …

I’ll begin with the article that Duke, a brilliant Experience Architect (he told me not to call him an Information Architect anymore), sent me this afternoon. The article is about amazing ways to visualize data. He is an expert in this field, and if it moved Duke enough to pass it on to me, I thought it would be worth my time to read it.

Data visualization may seem like an obscure Advanced Physics pre-req, but actually it’s a part of your everyday life. Highway signs, magazine articles, convenience store shelves, they are all examples of how information is put together to so that the user can make quick, informed decisions. Check out the link. You’ll dig it, and if you don’t, then feel free to call me a Nerd for thinking so.

The second article that I want to pass along was shared by The Short Fat Kid. The article is about words. Beautiful, meaningful words. Some time back the idea was adopted that the words used on the web should be quick and dirty… Not that kind of dirty.

Momentum was built around this line of thought for two reasons. First, speed was king. No malice was intended. It was believed to serve the reader best to be brief, and be done. Second, and this is just a shame, is because the words on the web were not crafted by gifted writers, rather they were assembled by programmers or whoever else in the office had time to help out.

Read the article. You’ll be encouraged that there are people out there that believe that you are intelligent, and that you can be moved by beauty.

I’m out of words now.

Tags: ad man, advertising, bryan jones, sites, the creativists, via