The Anxiety of Sequence Much of what's taught under the name of expository writing could be called "The Anxiety of Sequence." Its premise is this: To get where you're going, you have to begin in just the right place And take the proper path, Which depends on knowing where you plan to conclude. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing The Age of the Essay essays
Every Website is an Essay An Article by Robin Rendle css-tricks.com "Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color in a way that makes me sit up and listen. And I think that framing our work in this way lets us web designers explore exciting new possibilities. Instead of throwing a big carousel on the page and being done with it, thinking about making a website like an essay encourages us to focus on the tough questions. We need an introduction, we need to provide evidence for our statements, we need a conclusion, etc. This way we don’t have to get so caught up in the same old patterns that we’ve tried again and again in our work. And by treating web design like an essay, we can be weird with the design. We can establish a distinct voice and make it sound like an honest-to-goodness human being wrote it, too." writingwwwessays
Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale An Article by Brandon Dorn www.viget.com Here I describe an approach for defining new information architectures for large organizational websites managed by many stakeholder groups. Broadly speaking, there are four general phases to the approach: Auditing. Begin by immersing yourself in existing content and encourage stakeholders to adopt a critical, audience-minded perspective of their content. Diagramming. Work with stakeholders to develop new conceptual categories that better serve audiences and organizational direction. Elaborating. Think through content in detail and test new categories against specific instances and edge cases. Producing. Prepare content teams for production using a shared database of new sitemap pages and editorial considerations that you’ve developed incrementally. Half of design is facilitation The Ladder of AbstractionA Pattern Language decisionsorganizationpatternsanalytics
Half of design is facilitation At least half of the work of design is not design, because design isn’t just "making things"—it’s making things with other people, many of whom usually aren’t designers. This is true any time you’re working with others from a domain outside of your own. Communicating ideas, marshaling stakeholder consensus, soliciting and incorporating feedback, and redefining problems that weren’t fully known at the start are all the non-design work of design, what we might generally call "facilitation." designcommunication