I hadn’t checked the Peachpit Press web site for months, but I’ve found more titles to tempt me. So, not just the new titles by Robin Williams, but new books too by Steve Krug and by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice of the Nielsen Norman Group. Steve’s book, a “do-it-yourself guide to finding and fixing usability …
Category archives: Communicating
A blizzard of books (1)
I don’t know whether to be delighted or dismayed. Peachpit Press has published new titles by Robin Williams. Dismayed, because I’m in the middle of a clear-out and decluttering exercise that involves tens if not hundreds of books that I’ve accumulated over many years. And I’ve just splashed out on cut-price books at Borders, so I …
Accessibility – why bother?
I’ve been focusing a lot this year on web design, content and usability. Mainly because I’ve been working on my new web site, with lots of help from the wonderful and infinitely patient Zoë Tucker of Rude Goose. I’ve also attended several usability workshops run by the Nielsen Norman Group (aka NN/g) – and if anything focuses …
Of [talking] mice and men
The New York Times has been reporting on research by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Antropology in Leipzig, where scientists have genetically engineered a strain of mice whose FOXP2 gene [a gene sculpted by natural selection to play an important role in language] has been swapped for the human version. According to the paper, people …
Begging the question
An e-flyer arrived in my inbox last Thursday from the Italian Tourism Summit organisers. It read: La tripla crisi del turismo italiano: come uscirne, soluzioni e formule 4 June 2009 – Ascoli Piceno Consulta il programma e… …Partecipa! Did this tell me what the triple crisis afflicting Italian tourism is? No, it did not. So …
Art sublime
The Blessed Angelico: The Dawn of the Renaissance – the largest exhibition entirely dedicated to Beato Angelico since 1955 – is at Rome’s Capitoline Museums until 5 July 2009. If you’re planning a visit to Rome this summer, this is a unique opportunity to see these beautiful paintings in one place. And if not, you can …
Holey moly!
Dutch creative communications company Spranq has developed an ecofont that they say saves money and helps the environment by using less ink than other fonts. You can download the font free here. A professional version is also available for large organisations (Spranq will essentially punch holes in your corporate typeface to produce an environmentally-friendlier version). For people …
Ideas worth translating
TED: Ideas worth spreading is a web site featuring “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world”. To give you a flavour of the quality of the talks, you can rank them on the home page as: jaw-dropping, persuasive, courageous, ingenious, fascinating, inspiring, beautiful, funny or informative. The “Wow!” factor indeed. TED (which stands …
Worth two thousand words…
If the world were a village of 100 people, 9 would be English-speakers and 14 would be unable to read this post, no matter what their language. Toby Ng Kwong To’s “If the world were a village of 100 people” project uses information graphics to re-tell a statistical story in a creative, simple and accessible …
Oh, you saucy devil. Translators’ false friends
In my recent (9 May) post on “EU funding to delightful effect”, I used a word that – viewed from an Italian-to-English perspective – can trip up unwary translators. The word is “evocative”. Pretty harmless, you might think. One of the Italian words for “evocative” is “suggestivo”. A word that Italian-to-English translators working on auto-pilot …
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