Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
June/July 2006
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter June/July 2006 |
Editor's Note: Susan Becker, Patrick Lufkin, and Marc Smircich attended the STC's 53rd annual conference, which took place in Las Vegas from May 7-11. They have written articles describing their experiences for this edition of the ActiveVOICE. More articles about the conference are available at: www.stc-sf.org/newsletter/2006-jun/conference.html
Having attended the WritersUA Conference in Las Vegas in March 2005, I had some idea of what I was getting into by attending the STC Annual Conference there in May 2006: lots of cigarette smoke, long hikes through the din of electric slot machines to get just about anywhere, and outside, early summer in a desert. But I was also looking forward to some enlightening workshops, time with old friends, and an opportunity to sneak off to the Grand Canyon before the conference began.
The first thing you should know about Las Vegas is that people smoke cigarettes there, in every place, at all times. Except when they are smoking cigars. With some persistence, if you are a non-smoker, when you check in to your hotel, you might get the non-smoking room you requested months before, or you might be able to switch to a non-smoking room early the next morning. But you might just have to put on your big girl (or boy) panties and deal with it. In any case, cigarette smoke is a given. If you're used to living in Northern California, this situation can be rather irritating, and I'm not just speaking metaphorically here. But I'm done with that subject now.
So we can move on to another rather bizarre thing about Las Vegas: the Fountains of Bellagio.
I spent one enjoyable evening, dining al fresco (it cooled down enough to make that bearable) at the Mon Ami Gabi, watching, across Las Vegas Blvd, the Fountains of Bellagio dance, squirt, spurt, shoot sprays of water over 30 feet into the air, and perform other damp activities all to music every 15 minutes (in what the Bellagio Web site describes rather well as a "breathtaking union of water, music and light"). I asked some of my STC buddies at lunch the next day what the word is for this contrast: extravagant fountains in the middle of a desert. I liked best the suggestion of a cognitive disconnect, with its possibility of both delight and discomfort.
But about the conference. My goals were to learn something about CSS (cascading style sheets) as a tool for Web page design and anything about graphics. Also, since I was not presenting a session or representing the chapter this year, I hoped to view the conference more as an outsider or a "spy" for the rank and file membership.
I found only one mention of CSS as a minor point in a description of a session on Dreamweaver. But the conference had more to offer me on graphics. I attended three of the four sessions listed in the program's index under graphic design and graphics, two with Jean-luc Doumont and another with Patrick Hofmann.
Jean-luc Doumont, whom I thought of rather unfairly as that crazy Belgian (he is Belgian and "articulate, entertaining, and thought-provoking" as his Web site says, but not at all crazy), presented sessions on Effective Page Layout for the Nonartist and on Effective Slides: Design, Construction, and Use. I also attended his session on Magical Numbers.
In Page Layout, Jean-luc covered many of the basic concepts most of us have learned and forgotten, like using panels to design the page and lining up items. One idea I found new and particularly interesting, was that Jean-luc suggested using a single family of typefaces (like Lucida) that contains all the variations that you want to use in a single document (for example, not just regular, bold, and italic, but both serif and sans serif) rather than mixing fonts (like Times New Roman for serif and Arial for sans serif).
For Effective Slides, Jean-luc pulled pages from the session materials posted on the STC Annual Conference site and critiqued them based on his principles. For example, he believes that slides should not include footers (date, location, page number, etc.) because most of this information is irrelevant to the presentation. It is either archival data for the speaker (date, time, location) or simply an artifact from when presentations were made on transparencies using an overhead projector. (If you dropped your stack of transparencies, the pages had better be numbered!)
For a feeling of Jean-luc's ideas and his own spare and clean design, visit his Web site www.principiae.com. I would recommend any presentation he gives, including Magical Numbers, in which you can "learn the myth and reality behind the magical numbers 7+/-2."
Patrick Hofmann gave a well-organized presentation, packed with suggestions and tips, on Polishing Your Pictures: Bringing Consistency and Meaning to Your Visuals. The idea I found most immediately helpful was Patrick's concept of building standard attributes; that is, establishing styles for your graphics and then sticking to them. According to Patrick, your standards should define "Lines (line weight and colour), Fills (shading and colour values), Text (font, size, style, colour), Annotations (line, text, alignment)."
These styles are not necessarily supplied by the graphics tool you are using, but enforced by you. Patrick said his testing showed that users found the document "cleaner" even when they couldn't pinpoint why. Of course, it seems like we should all know this, but that's why I go to conferences: to be reminded and, yes, OK, maybe I don't know everything. You can review more of Patrick's presentation, which is posted with the session materials on the STC Annual Conference site.
As far as being a spy, I failed. It turns out that having presented in the past and worked as the San Francisco chapter's president for a couple of years, I just know too many people to be an outsider. I'm one of those irritating people that speakers call on by name during presentations (though unfortunately not Patrick or the crazy Belgian). I even ended up sitting at the president's table at the awards banquet not through any merit of my own, but because San Francisco chapter member, Dana Chisnell, received a President's Award for her work as AP (Assistant to the President) for Virtual Communities.
The most interesting event on the STC side was the board meeting (which in my attempt to be an outsider, I skipped, to go swimming). It went on for almost three hours one evening, bogged down (or embroiled) in a discussion of a motion put forward by Jeff Randolph (an STC member, but not a board member) on directing money to the SIGs and chapters. The meeting then moved into a discussion of who could vote, what a quorum was and if there was one, before the session was recessed until the following day.
I did attend the reconvening of the meeting and can confirm that our new secretary, Char James-Tanny, recounts it well in the 2006 Annual Business Meeting Report at www.stc.org/PDF_Files/0605_AnnualBusMtgReport.pdf, which you can read from the STC Web site if you're a member. In a nutshell, the STC Annual Business Meeting provides an opportunity for members to communicate their concerns face-to-face with the board. But we members can't make motions or vote. Board members can vote, and they can present issues to the entire membership for a vote by mail.
Finally, I just can't cover the Grand Canyon in this short article (which could really be even shorter). For now all I can say is go, stroll along the rim or sit quietly and watch the colors change for an hour or two, hike down below the rim, even just a mile and a half as I did, watch the California condors eat trash or, if you're lucky, soar.
Copyright © 2006 by the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter (www.stc-sf.org). This article may be reprinted in another STC publication under the provisions of the chapter's copyright policy.