Today's Topic

"Information Design: Part 1"
Running time: about 20 minutes

What kind of people make good information designers? Should you have a site map? What link colors should you use? Drue gives you all the answers (anal retentives, it depends on the size of the site, and whatever hues that pass the "squint test"), provides you with some tips for dealing with the many challenges of site design (how do you orient users who follow links to pages buried deep on your site and never even see your frontdoor?), and a lot more. About 20 minutes more.

"Information Design: Part 2"
Running time: about 15 minutes

Drue exposes some common bad design habits that blight the Web: underlining text that isn't a link, neglecting to title Web pages (or giving them some generic name like "my homepage," which becomes meaningless in the context of a search result page or a list of bookmarks), abusing frames, creating lame-o icons, and using unsavory or misleading design metaphors. Then she wraps up the show with her predictions of a bustling future for information design.

Listen

Part 1
MP3 streaming version
MP3 download version
File size: 2.44 MB
What you'll need: an MP3 player like Sonique or Winamp — you may need to configure your browser or download a fix to stream MP3s.

QuickTime version
File size: 3.46 MB
What you'll need: QuickTime 4

Part 2
MP3 streaming version
MP3 download version
File size: 3.4 MB
What you'll need: an MP3 player like Sonique or Winamp — you may need to configure your browser or download a fix to stream MP3s.

QuickTime version
File size: 1.5 MB
What you'll need: QuickTime 4

Related Links

The Women's Wire site map (an example of "color channeling")
Adobe's site map and site index (illustrating the difference between the two different kinds of site guides)
The US Patent and Trademark Office site map (an example of a terrible site index)
Technicolour Tyre Company (an example of excessive underlining)
Southwest Airlines' old site and Café Herpé (examples of bad-metaphor design)

Credits

About the guest, Drue Miller
Drue is a creative director of information. She also teaches an information design course at San Francisco State and has her own vanity domain, drue.com.

About the host, Jeffrey Veen
Who is Jeff? Jeff is a worker (Wired Digital's executive director of interface), a writer (of many a Webmonkey article as well as a book, HotWired Style: Principles for Making Smart Web Sites), a speaker (at a slew of conferences), a rider (of bicycles), and an eater (of Zeke's absurdly greasy chili cheese "49 dog").

Audio engineer: Kevin "Tech Vest" Hunsaker
Startup and shutdown music: The Fencecutters

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