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Wednesday, April 10, 2013

The tools I use.

In this article I will go over the Information Design tools I regularly use in the production of this blog.
I was recently asked what tools I have used in the design and production of this blog.  There have been three primary tools I have relied heavily upon.  The first is Photoshop from Adobe for the creation and manipulation of the images displayed on this site.  The second is CorelDraw from Corel.  This I use for the production line art, which I then finalize in Photoshop.  The difference between these two is Photoshop is a raster-based (think pixels) product, while CorelDraw is a vector-based (think lines) program.  Raster images do not scale well, but vector images are not designed for display in web browsers. 

For information design purposes, I would add two additional desktop tools from Microsoft - Excel for the production of charts and graphs; Visio for the creation of flowcharts and certain types of other graphics.

However, the single most important tool in use for the production of this site is Blogger – the content management system underlying this blog.  Blogger provides a number of key tools for the creation and customization of a blog site.  Starting with fully customizable HTML-based templates, and easily added gadgets, the system allows for each blogger to craft a site unique to themselves.

While the tool allows an author to fully customize their blog using client-side Javascript, CSS, and HTML, it also provides simple to use editors and site designers that require no knowledge of these technologies.  Additionally it provides for building a social network component into a user’s blog through comments. Finally it provides an excellent set of tools for performing web analytics, showing how much traffic a site is seeing and where that traffic is originating.

Best of all, Google provides all features of Blogger for free.  There are no upgrades.  The only opportunity to spend money is on high-end third-party templates.
 

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1 comment:

  1. Information Design DailyApril 11, 2013 at 10:25 AM

    What a marvelous post! Talk about SEEING the forest for the trees in Blogger. It’s so easy to miss that obvious, and remarkable tool, but you nailed it. And all your points about customization, social networking, analytics – great. And yes, it’s free, which is also significant. It’s impressive how your post reads so easily, but is packed with all sorts of fantastic information.

    I appreciate you sharing your knowledge with us!

    - - Michelle Hayes

    (Pardon the two removed posts...I flubbed, twice.)

    ReplyDelete

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"delivering the BIG PICTURE through managing the little details"
 
When you sit in a boardroom with Tim Foley, it becomes clear that he is a key contributor and valued advisor within the IT Security environment.  And, what may not be as readily apparent is a more personal side that compliments and adds depth to his management style.  Often using humor and real-life examples to illustrate a point, Tim brings an air of levity to an often dry and complex technical discussion.  Recently, when explaining the mortgage crisis of 2007 to a neighbor, he likened it to buying strawberries at Costco and created an entire scenario surrounding the process.  Afterwards, the neighbor remarked that although he had been trying to understand the mortgage crisis situation for some time, he had never truly understood it clearly until this discussion.  Being an avid reader, Tim brings a wealth of general knowledge into his discussions, making him an engaging conversationalist.