Finnotype

Have you seen the recent boom in infographics? Everybody and their mom is doing them. Infographics are used to illustrate  complex data , timelines , trends ,  cheat sheets  and much more . They make complex processes easier to understand and visualize trends that you can't see with the naked eye. Can infographics be used in technical documentation? At Magnolia we drew a  roadmap  for migrating from Magnolia CMS 4.4 to 4.5. It is a winding road that involves many tasks. Each milestone is explained on a wiki page in detail. Here are the design guidelines I used in case you want to create an infographic of your own. Use a diagram tool  such as Visio or OmniGraffle. You will be using lots of boxes and connectors and resizing and scaling the elements. Working with vector shapes is easier and results in a sharp image. Max width 1000 px . Keep the width under 1000 pixels. This is a size that everyone can see without scrolling horizontally. ...

Update! Picnik is closing on April 19, 2012 .  This is sad news. I really liked working with the product. Please sign the  Don't Close Picnik petition ! A subset of Picnik features is available in the Google+ Creative Kit but, crucially, the Photo Bucket is not. This means that the custom circles and arrows we use to annotate images are gone. At Magnolia, we recently started using Picnik  to annotate screenshots. We wanted a casual but obvious way to draw the reader's attention to an image detail. In this post I explain why we chose Picnik and how it is working so far. Picnik is a photo editor that runs in the browser. You may have seen it as the embedded photo editor in Picasa Web Albums. The requirements that drove us to a Web-based tool were: No OS lock-in . We have technical writers working on Windows 7, Vista and Mac OSX. It is difficult to find a screenshot tool that works on all those platforms. Skitch  is awesome on the Mac but a Wi...