Colors

This whole week was dedicated to design where I had to dive back into some of my technical writing books.

Document Design: A Guide for Technical Communicators by Miles A. Kimball and Ann R. Hawkins. Seriously, a book to keep on hand. Needed to look up color usage and accessibility. The online tools I found were okay, but they didn’t seem quite right when it came to saturation and contrast for indicators.

Team Writing: A Guide to Working in Groups by Joanna Wolfe. This should be a required book for online based companies. I don’t want to be overbearing and step on others toes, especially because I can’t do that much writing in a week. So, getting as many people as possible to jump in and share in the spoils seems like a much better plan. I’d rather share the treasure of success than wear the shame of failure alone.

Technical Editing in the 21st Century by Nicole Amare, Barry Nowlin, and Jean Hollis Weber. It’s a bit on the older side, but it’s fantastic for soft skills. That’s not expected from a book with “Technical” and “Editing” in the title, but I’m appreciative.

Images

I’ve had a neat training session involving images this week. I grew up with a Mac and Photoshop, but have never really had the artistic eye. It’s good to know that I can look for very specific markers to get me by until I get better at it. I know I’ve been loving the pictures on this blog.

While I’ve been diving in trying to remember all the lessons from a few years ago, I’ve also been learning html/CSS. I just completed a foundation course in HTML and I’m finishing up the CSS foundation course. I hope to start planning out my own website soon. There’s a class that walks you through making your own blog, but I think I’ll keep this fine one for as long as I can.

The big connection with images and learning HTML, is the ingrained style that comes with learning to code. Without style, HTML seems nearly meaningless. I would just be creating a single line from left to right that babbles into infinity. Seriously, where’s the fun in that? So as I explore images, I need to consider how colors/styles look online.

Backgrounds

I’ve been working from home for months now. Constantly embarrassed by my near blank wall behind me. During this whole virus pandemic everyone has jumped online and as a result they have become more conscience of video conferencing backgrounds. Let me say, while I’ll sit on my box of double-standards, I don’t think anyone should worry about what’s in their backgrounds right now. I know I don’t care and you shouldn’t either.

That being said, using the virtual backgrounds in Zoom are just neat. Not because they look cool, but because they remind me about one of my favorite LexBlog qualities, “ooooh, what’s that do?”. Every time we utilize a piece of tech, there’s always someone that plays around and finds some hidden feature. We’ve done it for webinars, emailing lists, CRM’s, you name it and someone at LexBlog is going to play with it.

Saw this tweet that makes me want to say, “you should have played around with it more”:

Take that little bit of extra time to play or, at the very least, test.

Of sorts

Every day has been filled to the brim with stuff. I have been having a hard time keeping up, but it’s fun. It’ll be interesting to see how much building online communities will be a thing for me after the virus. I’m not sure who will want me in their program, considering everyone will be an expert. I’ll just have to keep trying my best. Have a good weekend. Stay safe, stay sane.