My journey to content design began with technology consulting. In 2008, as a technology consultant, I started writing about SharePoint. By the time I joined Microsoft as a content developer in 2016, I’d written 200 blog posts and co-authored two books on SharePoint. As a new Microsoft employee, I wrote the first articles about the new SharePoint apps. Eventually, I took responsibility for writing the words in the app, as well. SharePoint’s a critical, but often hidden part of Microsoft’s cloud
Read more →Archive for the Content design Category
Understand Microsoft’s Fluent design system better with hands-on experience with the developer components of the system. If you’re like most designers I work with, you’re familiar with the Figma components of the design systems your product teams use. Another step you can take to learn about the design system is to work with the developer components, too. When you stretch your skills into this new space, you’ll understand the capabilities of the system better. The next time a developer tells
Read more →Unlike Twitter, Mastodon developers use an open-source model. Open-source means, if you take the effort to, you can see the source of the messages you see on screen. Because Mastodon is an open-source app developed on GitHub, you can create an issue when you see something wrong. The following screenshot highlights some text I see on my Mastodon home page, “Pinned post”, followed by a screenshot of the same string, in code. The next screenshot shows the same message “Pinned post”, in the file
Read more →Today, Episode 46 of the MS Cloud IT Pro Podcast was published. I was the guest and our conversation included some discussion of UI Text Design. UI Text Design was new to me a year ago and it’s something you don’t hear about every day, so I thought I’d share some more on the role. The screenshot above shows the list view drop down in SharePoint. Even as I look at it now, I see UI text that doesn’t follow
Read more →format c: The MS DOS Manual taught me the true power of the PC. Typing those 9 characters and hitting Enter made a very large change in my computer. Before I ran that command, my computer booted. I turned on the power switch and I got a prompt to perform an action. After, it didn’t do anything. Something like this had never happened with my last “home computer,” the Atari 800 XL. No matter what I did with that device,
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