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Technical Writing Blog

Grow your technical writing expertise with industry news, best practices, articles, product updates

TechComm Zen: Balance of Text and Screenshots in User Manuals

TechComm Zen: Balance of Text and Screenshots in User Manuals

The numbers paint an accurate picture: visual content rules the digital world. Articles that feature relevant images get about 94% more views than content without graphics. Moreover, the human brain is wired to respond better to visual stimuli than text. In fact, we process images 60,000 times faster than the written word. That’s undoubtedly huge….

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Posted in Documentation UX on 10/26/2017

Increase Your Online Documentation Load Speed

Increase Your Online Documentation Load Speed

Let’s be honest. Speed is everything these days. If a website (or, an online documentation portal takes just one second too long to load, it can negatively affect your business. And, with the mobile Internet on the rise, online users just aren’t willing to wait for anything. In fact, 47% of people expect a page…

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Posted in Documentation UX on 9/25/2017

Improving Documentation Readability: Dark UI vs Light UI

Improving Documentation Readability: Dark UI vs Light UI

Readability is an obligatory feature for software documentation design. For any user documentation design, really. As you know, it is generally achieved by the font size, shape of letters, and contrast between text and the background. It can be either: dark on light, or light on dark. Both work. But, still, when the time comes…

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Posted in Documentation UX on 8/29/2017

Top 5 Online Pattern Generators

Top 5 Online Pattern Generators

The amount of helpful design resources keeps growing. But, still, the quality ones are hard to find without guidance. And, the guidance we offer! In case you are new to design and even creating a color scheme sounds impossible to you, check out our guest blog post, and you will learn that creating a color…

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Posted in Documentation UX on 8/13/2017

Top 6 Monospaced Fonts Overview

Top 6 Monospaced Fonts Overview

Monospaced fonts or non-proportional fonts are the ones where any symbol has the same width which is often achieved by adding more empty space before and after a letter or a character. Monospaced fonts always remind us of programming, code, hackers and such. It is no coincidence these fonts are used in application development IDEs….

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Posted in Documentation UX on 5/26/2017

Free Audio for Commercial Use

Free Audio for Commercial Use

Music is forever – or so they say. But, there’s definitely some truth in this statement. While some forms of art are lost and forgotten, music is something that has been accompanying people for thousands of years without losing its momentum. Tutorial videos can sound awkward without a background track, same goes for promo videos,…

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Posted in Documentation UX on 3/15/2017

5 Ultimate Tips For Choosing Fonts

5 Ultimate Tips For Choosing Fonts

Fonts are means of transmitting information. You know that you’ve picked the right ones when not the fonts grab readers’ attention, but the message. Further in this post, we will take a look at common mistakes in font usage and give you practical advice how to pick fonts for different kinds of narratives and combine…

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Posted in Documentation UX on 11/8/2016

6 Tips For Online Documentation Design

6 Tips For Online Documentation Design

When you need to create user documentation, one thing you start thinking about is how this documentation will look like. Apparently, you can write great content and describe all the features for users. But what about the style, layout, fonts, colors, background, etc.? Even if you think that developing some special design for user manuals…

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Posted in Documentation UX on 9/5/2016

7 Great Sources of Free Graphics for Web Designers

7 Great Sources of Free Graphics for Web Designers

We are often blogging about technical writing, web development, CSS, software documentation and all the technical stuff. Today, we are going to change the habits and turn from tech to beauty – this is a review of some great web resources with free graphics. You will learn something new about the CC0 license, smoking mantis,…

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Posted in Documentation UX on 4/26/2016

SlideShare Presentations in User Manuals

SlideShare Presentations in User Manuals

Many companies use SlideShare as a stage for their marketing activities and specifically the content marketing. However, people also host technical content there and you can do the same. Of course, you would need to present your content in a form that differs from what technical writers normally use – a presentation. But if you…

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Posted in Documentation UX on 2/25/2015