Negative taste is the ability to tell when something is bad. Positive taste is the ability to make something that is good. Indeed, one might even say that there is only one kind of taste and positive taste is simply negative taste plus skills.

I like that definition because it acknowledges that some people can have taste without being creative or artistic. You can have have a strong design sense without necessarily being able to create anything yourself. That’s an important attribute for communications and marketing professionals who lead or hire creative teams.

People with negative taste can make things that look really nice, but they also look very plain. [...] People with negative taste can recognize people with positive taste and hire them. People with no taste, on the other hand, fail to see the difference.

People with no taste should just steer clear of creative decisions.

Another excellent infographic video from XPLANE. Also, read the brief case study.

Information design consultancy XPLANE has released a visual bizspeak poster for the holidays. Download it. Print it. Find it. Enjoy.

I tend to agree, though I think there’s a limited set of circumstances in which a well-designed pie chart call tell the right story. But I agree that 3D pie charts are universally bad, and I have found a stunning example of a worthless pie chart. In fact, I think I’ve found the worst pie chart ever.*

This information design atrocity was committed by a high profile New York interactive agency that shall remain nameless.**

Pie charts are used to show the approximate proportional relationship of one slice to the whole pie. Critics of pie charts argue that pie charts are not well suited for exact comparisons of slices because it’s difficult to accurately estimate the relative area of each slice. Rotating a pie chart to add 3D effects compounds the problem.***

In this case, the angle of rotation severely skews the chart, making it impossible to distinguish the relative sizes of the slices without the data labels. The 2% and 8% slices look about the same size, as do the 29% and 42% slices.

The problem is compounded by the bands of color that fill the pie. Unlike most pie charts — the ones you can actually read — the fill on this chart is unrelated to the slices. The slices, which represent the data, are rendered as a white overlay with varying degrees of transparency on each slice.

What were they thinking?

1. * This pie chart from Fox is making the rounds. It’s stupid but not a visual train wreck.
2. ** It rhymes with LaserDish.
3. *** Jon Peltier illustrates the case against 3D pie charts using a less extreme example.

I saw this on Business Guys On Business Trips. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry, because it looks like several real messages in my inbox.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

– Marcel Proust

I’ve been fond of that quote for many years, and it leaps to mind again now as my boss Jody moves to a new a position as the executive director of marketing and communications at The Children’s Hospital in Denver. Jody has worked at the same financial services company for 18 years, so it’s understandable that she’s feeling some trepidation along with her obvious excitement.

I had similar doubts when I left a 10-year tenure at a publishing software company to enter the financial services industry, but I managed to survive the transition without scars and I’m confident that Jody will survive and thrive in a new industry as well.

Surviving

Surviving is the easy part. While many companies try to hire people with relevant industry experience, the core skills of public relations — building relationships, telling compelling stories, thinking strategically about influence and the impact of actions and words, expertise with tools and tactics — are completely transferable.

Any time you change industries (or even categories within the same industry) you have to learn new jargon, new issues, and new business drivers, but if you have a passion to learn and a passion to communicate what you’ve learned, communications skills are transferable.

Thriving

Moving into a new industry is also an opportunity to bring a fresh perspective to an organization. It’s the perfect time for a communications executive to examine a company’s messages without the curse of knowledge. When you know something intimately it’s hard to imagine not knowing it and therefore hard to communicate in a way that’s compelling to the uninitiated.

Ask questions and examine assumptions. Fresh perspective is a fleeting gift to a new employer, and you may find that your new colleagues learn as much from you as you do from them. As Zen master Shunryu Suzuki reminds me from the sidebar of this blog, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”

I think Marcel Proust and Shunryu Suzuki would have found plenty to talk about over coffee (or tea) and I think they’d agree that new jobs in new industries can bring exciting discoveries, both for employers and employees.

Congratulations and best of luck, Jody.

Photo credit: Duff_sf

That makes a lot of sense because it you can only send messages to people who want to hear from you. You can’t spam people by direct message.

It becomes a problem, however, if you’re trying to respond privately to customers who don’t follow you. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Twitter’s help bar is wrong.

Here’s an example. I tried to send a direct message from a Twitter account I maintain at work to my personal account and received this error message:

Here’s the problem. If you send follow gturpin to Twitter, you start following @gturpin, not the other way around. It doesn’t send a message to @gturpin requesting to follow you.* Click to see the image at full size.

It doesn’t allow you to send a direct message. It gives you the wrong information and leads you to believe that you’re doing the right thing.

That’s broken.

Usability fail, Twitter.

1. * That would get ugly in a hurry.

Paul Sherman tells CIOs and directors of IT:

Your technology selection processes are incomplete. You’re not assessing the usability of the technology you buy. You’re not only incurring huge hidden costs because of this failure to assess usability, you’re letting enterprise technology vendors get away with building products with poor usability.

The first post highlights the importance of user experience in the success of enterprise software implementations, and provides case studies to back up the claim. Part two offers a framework that can help enterprises better assess the usability and appropriateness of enterprise applications.

Read them here:

• The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters
• The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters, Part 2: Strategic User Experience

P.S. Bonus points to Paul for the statement “Featuritis is a pernicious malady.”

Peter, this list is for you and anyone else who likes to listen in on the secret life of space-going instruments.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, some of the links no longer work.

Photo credit: NASA/Troy Cryder

General

• NASA: News from NASA
• NASA EDGE: A look behind the NASA curtain
• NASA Public Affairs: NASA public affairs updates
• NASA HQ Photo: Only one update so far
• NASA Prize: Finding innovative solutions to NASA’s technical challenges through prize competitions open to the citizen inventor

Facilities and programs

• Ames Research Center: NASA Ames Research Center
• Desert Rats: Desert Research and Technology Studies team
• Houston Space Center: Official Visitors Center of NASA’s Johnson Space Center
• Langley Research Center: No updates yet
• LSP: Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center
• Lunar Science Institute: Supports NASA’s lunar science and exploration programs

Vehicles, missions and instruments

• DMV: Prototype dust mitigation vehicle at Goddard Space Flight Center
  
• IBEX: Interstellar Boundary EXplorer, a small explorer mission to map the boundary of the solar system
• Kepler: First mission capable of finding Earth-size and smaller planets around other stars
• Mars Phoenix: Studying the history of water and habitability potential in the Martian arctic’s ice-rich soil
  
• LADEE: Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, which will orbit the Moon and characterize the atmosphere and lunar dust environment
• LRO: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is being built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
• LCROSS: Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, which will explore the Moon and see if there is water ice near one of the lunar poles
• MAAT: Something to do with asteroids?
• SDO-HMI: HMI instrument on board NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory
• SM4: Hubble servicing mission 4
• TESS: Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a planet searching satellite in development with MIT

NASA fans on Twitter

• International Space Station
• Live On Mars
• NASA Kepler Fan
• NASA Watch
• Space Shuttle Atlantis
• Space Shuttle Discovery
• Space Shuttle Endeavour

1. * Twitter is a major distribution channel for Peter’s Help A Reporter (HARO) service. If you work in PR and don’t subscribe to HARO, subscribe now. It’s free
2. ** Did I miss any?