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Thanks, Gene. That was my sense too about the time period, but one of the support people pointed out something interesting: that the outer circle and the intersection seems to suggest that you can only transition from idle mode to sequencing on a monthly basis, whereas in fact you could jump from idle to sequencing at *any* point along that outer circle. But I mean, there's only so many things you can show in one configuration like that, and it took a while to come up with that solution after multiple tries.
I'm *definitely* going to check out that London Underground map -- that sounds very cool, and exactly the kind of thing I'm interested in. Thank you very much.
Steve
From: Gene Kim-Eng [mailto:techwr -at- genek -dot- com]
Sent: Friday, February 14, 2014 12:39 PM
To: Janoff, Steven
Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: Critique of a sample
The positioning looks fine to me. Top/bottom won't be as potentially confusing to some readers as other layouts might be if you end up localizing the poster to languages that read in different directions. WRT time periods, I would think the larger circle should represent the longest process chain if the two are not the same?
If you end up having to depict branching processes, you probably can't go wrong with the format of the London Underground map. It seems work for all manner of things, and readers of all languages seem to be able to follow it.
Gene Kim-Eng
On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 12:07 PM, Janoff, Steven <Steven -dot- Janoff -at- ga -dot- com> wrote:
Oh, I will say that -- to show your point is a good one about the test -- I did struggle with whether to make the circles equal in size. Also relative position: inside vs. outside, top vs. bottom vs. left or right, concentric vs. intersecting. It was really quite a challenge. Also, different configurations resulted in different directions of things: left to right vs. right to left, clockwise vs. counterclockwise. It was incredibly challenging to make everything work together, like watchmaking. I think we ended up with a fairly good piece, although I think there's a more optimal solution that we didn't have time to reach. There was also an issue with relative time periods that we couldn't quite resolve. It's like a math problem. (I also experimented with different shapes other than the circle, but kept coming back.)
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