Category Archives: Thoughts

I’m at Oakland Intl Airport catching a flight back after a three day workshop on The Principles of Graphic Facilitation hosted by The Grove. PGF Program Principles of Graphic Facilitation – This two day workshop builds on core skills in meeting facilitation and graphic recording and connects the two skills. Either on its own can be a powerful tool,Continue reading “Principles of Graphic Facilitation Workshop by The Grove”

I’ve been paying particular attention to bus riders in Seattle. I’ve notice a growing trend of smart phone addicts. We’re still children, holding onto our Starbucks coffee (our adult sippy cup) and grasping our smart phones inches from our face (our toy). The weather in Seattle is amazing in September. This is when summer startsContinue reading “Put down that iPhone, stop and smell the roses”

Standard templates are not optimized for readability. A Word document has standard margins of 1″ on each side. With an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, that’s 6.5″ of text. PowerPoint is even worse. In landscape view, that is 9″ of text. Newspapers and magazines have been working on layout for years. They use narrowContinue reading “Formatting your document for readability: column width”

Most people read the newspaper, the one that’s printed on paper. The typical newspaper font size is between 8 and 9 points. A typical newspaper compresses a lot of information in a very small space. Large headlines are used to generate interest and the reader can selectively choose what he/she wants to read. Take aContinue reading “Increasing the resolution or data density of documents”

Here’s a good quote from Mark Zuckerberg in his visit to the Seattle Facebook office: “One thing you find in engineering is a really good person is like 10 times as productive as pretty good person. I’m not talking about a bad person – I think bad people are negatively productive because of all theContinue reading “Facebook on hiring good engineers”

I just got back from an Edward Tufte one day seminar yesterday. Below is just a transcription of my notebook. In the following weeks, I’ll highlight a few points. In the mean time, I suggest you attend a course if you can. It comes with four of his books. Otherwise, read them, they’re full ofContinue reading “Edward Tufte notes”