My approach to information design

Over the past twenty years I have been developing three overlapping and mutually informing careers: the first as a writer, the second in teaching interpersonal communication skills, and the third in designing and programming educational web sites and online libraries.  I am convinced that each of these has helped me think more clearly about the other two.

My publishing, design and management practice is focused on educational and public service organizations. I also enjoy helping businesses that are doing something ecologically innovative.  I have university degrees in business, religious studies and interpersonal communication, and my best developed skills are as an editor and information architect, helping my clients to stay focused on their most important messages and not get distracted by a forest of technical details and web page features. I team up with different technical specialists on a project-by-project basis.

Web design projects are especially interesting and challenging because they bring together five very different types of creativity:

• visual (creating a graphic landscape),
• verbal (telling a story or presenting an argument),
• mathematical (programming an interactive process),
• social (bringing people together to meet needs and reach goals), and
• synergistic / heuristic / boundary crossing (bringing different forms of publishing into mutually enhancing partnerships, books and web sites, for example).

In seeking to weave these five strands together ever more gracefully, I and my teammates (who are also independent professionals) are always learning, and always looking for examples from which we can learn and get inspired. (I would very much appreciate receiving the addresses of your favorite web sites and the reasons why you like them.)

My main design principles co-exist in a state of mutual creative tension. They are:

• FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION #1: Stay focused on helping the organization define and fulfill its mission of service. (If you don't know what you want most out of your web site, it becomes impossible to optimize the site for that goal.)

• FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION #2: Organize the site or document from the point of view of the visitors / clients / customers / students / readers, to meet their needs and goals.

• Make the site easy to use, make the book easy to read.

• Let the content tell its own story. Keep visual design elements as simple as possible, and always in service of the story.

• Keep pages technically as simple as possible, and therefore small, fast and accessible to as wide an audience as possible.  (That means, at least for now, no Java applets.)

• Learn from, and adapt to, visitors, clients and customers.  (I use activity statistics to understand visitors' interests.)

• Technologically, stay at least one generation back from the leading edge.  Let other people debug and refine the latest web features and gizmos before forcing one's visitors to cope with them.

I have applied these design principles to the following sites and I invite you to visit them.  I also welcome your comments and suggestions.

I would be happy to discuss your educational web site or online publishing project, and I can arrange to coordinate with English-speaking clients anywhere in the world.  You can reach me at (888) 388-2484, or send me e-mail at rivers@newconversations.net.  You will find my collected books, articles and essays at www.karunabooks.net/dennis_rivers.htm

Dennis Rivers, MA
1563 Solano Ave. #164
Berkeley, CA 94707

Copyright 2007 by Dennis Rivers.