Death by Font?

September 2016

Southern Communicator’s June issue contains some more great reading for technical communicators in Australasia.

There’s a fascinating article on the dangers of poor typography, replete with examples from areoplanes, roads, weather forecasts, and cigarette packets. It’s a referenced analysis that will help you explain and justify your font recommendations. See How typography can save your life, by Lena Groeger of ProPublica.

In Andrew Wright’s The challenge of developing call centre content, he takes less than two pages to deliver some of the best advice for writing business procedures that I’ve seen in a while. While he’s writing from the perspective of a call centre worker, the advice is equally applicable to other busy workers needing to access the content they need, at the right level of detail they need for the current task. Janet Taylor continues this theme with a review of Clarity out of complexity: writing effective workplace procedures, by Rosemary O’Donoghue.