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Don't you have to consider cultural differences with text as well?
And yes, I do agree with your point though... It's all in the "know thy
audience" commandment of technical writing. ;) I think Gerber missed
that passage when shipping baby food to third world nations a while
back. *lol*
Every form of communication has limitations and ideal uses. I'm not
arguing that images are better than words, but in the right situations
they can be. I'll take a network diagram over a text description of the
network any day!
B I L L S W A L L O W
Information Design & Development Professional
tel/fax: 518.371.1867 wswallow -at- nycap -dot- rr -dot- com
List Owner: HATT, WWP-Users, InFrame
Co-Moderator: SingleSourcing-Mgmt
WebWorks Wizard Editor of InFrame Magazine
::: -----Original Message-----
::: ... You don't need to be able
::: to read to know that a pictograph of a skull and bones,
::: wedge between an
::: arm and a hand, or a red triangle with an exclamation point
::: in it mean
::: DANGER. You can also communicate an overview of an assembly process
::: quicker with an image than words, or communicate how a circuit is
::: constructed, or any workflow, hierarchy, or system.
:::
:::
::: What you need for these types of visual cues is a cultural basis for
::: interpreting them.
::: Quite often, we forget how much cultural baggage is associated with
::: pictorial information.
::: There have been many studies on how American-designed
::: pictures/glyphs/icons
::: used in technical docs are interpreted in foreign countries by local
::: document users. Often the information is misinterpreted and
::: the mistakes are
::: compounded by the fact that the pictures and text "seem" at odds.
:::
::: I do not mean to imply that pictures are not useful, but
::: that as information
::: technicians, we need to understand the limits such communication.
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