Comics for Serious Business

The Dutch design firm Qua recently made a comic book for PON Holdings. Much as graphic novels do, this comic book uses pictures, dialogue, and captions to convey serious information: it’s a strategy manual for PON’s employees. About their choice of medium, Qua writes, “The ‘comic’ had to have a business-look with recognizable people and products

Don’t Write This: Yahoo Layoff Gaffe

When Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang got to work writing an e-mail about layoffs, he made some serious blunders. Which was worse — the fact that he sounded patronizing and euphemistic, or that he only used his SHIFT key twice, to make the exclamation point in “yahoo!”? From his e-mail: “having layoffs is very difficult, particularly in light of all we’ve experienced this year.  but we don’t take these decisions lightly

A Rose by Any Other Branding

Ever wonder where companies got the brilliant names for products like Barbie, Milk Duds, and Grape Nuts? Their branding was so successful the names are now household words, but many companies named their products almost carelessly. Ask for It by Name tracks these brandnames’ histories, and comes up with some surprising results.   Formica? Named after mica, a common electrical insulator, which it was meant to replace

Give Your Reader a Break: Cut the Clutter

Work keeps us busy–for most of us, busier than we’d like. So we don’t have the luxury of pondering over the prose that crosses our desks or arrives in our inboxes. We need the information and we need it quickly

Google It Faster; Write It Better

Efficient research is critical to solid writing. The blog Dumb Little Man has a useful post on using Google more efficiently. Even when you aren’t writing a “research” essay, do a quick survey of the Internet just to see what other people have written on your topic