Touchstone Awards Special Report

By Becky Rude

Many EBSTC members were active as volunteers at this year's Touchstone Awards, which were held at the beginning of April at the San Ramon Marriott. I thought it would be interesting for you to meet the winners of the Best of Show awards and to let you in on their secrets!

Shown here from left to right are Joe Humbert, Tejashree Uppala, Linda Schaltz, and Gwaltney Mountford, who set up the publications display.

Best of Show—Technical Publications: Bently Nevada Corporation

Joy Curtis accepted the award at Touchstone for her work on the ORBIT magazine project. Steve Sabin and Scott Meikrantz are also on the team. You can see reprints from the magazine on Bently's website.

Joy is the managing editor for ORBIT. Bently monitors the "health" of rotating and reciprocating machinery. According to Joy, "as Managing Editor, I not only shepherd the articles from start to finish through the review process and help decide the pagination of the magazine, but I also do the copyediting and proofreading, write abstracts of all the articles, request purchase orders and keep track of the budget, and maintain the shipping list to over 40 countries." Joyce has worked at Bently Nevada for three and a half years.

What are three of the biggest challenges you had on this project?

• Getting the writers to turn the articles in on time.
• Getting the reviewers to return the articles on time.
• Staying within budget.

What are three things that led to the project's success?

• Dedicated, hard-working team members.
• Production artists and editors who pay attention to detail.
• Following the standards we have set.

If you had to give advice to a new tech writer, what would it be?

First, become familiar with the company, the company standards, and use reference books often until the standards become ingrained. If the company has no standard, then ask if you can write one. (My favorite reference is The Gregg Reference Manual by William Sabin; I recommend it to everybody. For very technical publications, NIST's Guide for the Use of the International System of Units is excellent, especially for those of us in the United States who were not raised with these standards.)

Second, ask questions and network within the company as much as possible—find out who knows what, and then ask lots of questions.

Third, don't be afraid to make mistakes. We all make mistakes and hopefully learn from them. We are never finished learning—that is one of the exciting things about our profession.

Last, but of course not least, don't forget the basics of good writing of any type: organize your thoughts, write clearly and concisely, and always keep the reader in mind (know your audience).

What did you enjoy the most about the Touchstone Awards event?

I would have to say I really enjoyed the surprise of our team winning the Best of Show Award. I was totally in shock! But other than that, I really enjoyed meeting great people from so many businesses. This was the first STC event that I have attended, because Nevada is so far away from all of the chapter meetings and other events.

Best of Show – Online Communication: EPSON America, Inc.

Amy Dorsett and Warren Ernst accepted the award at Touchstone for their work on the EPSON Printer Information Center project. Amy is a technical editor who has been with EPSON for six years and Warren is a technical writer who has worked there for three years. Other team members are Karen Bergen, scriptwriter, and Linus Su, graphic artist.

How long did the project take?

Approximately seven weeks, though that time was also dedicated to other projects.

What are your roles? Since this project seems to combine tech writing and graphic artist skills, I'm curious whether you had an artist on the team.

Warren and I decided what graphic elements we wanted in the design, then a graphic designer (Linus) created the elements for us. Karen wrote the scripts and helped test the movies. Warren and I put all of the elements together to create the movies and the movie launcher in Flash. We created the animation, programmed the navigation and other interface elements, edited and imported the sound, and got the screen captures and animated them.

What are three of the biggest challenges you had on this project?

• We decided that we didn't want to build separate movies for Windows and Macintosh, and I refused to simply eliminate the Macintosh movies. Instead, I programmed buttons and other navigational elements that allowed the user to specify his or her operating system, and to view only content related to that operating system. Some of the movies had shared elements, so I added automatic navigation that prevented building those segments into the movie timeline twice.
• A second challenge was the coordination and organization of all the movies (there were 18). Warren built a great launcher interface that allows users to choose the topics they are interested in. We also had to link the movies together with a related topics feature that I created. All of this required lots of testing and action script checking.
• A third challenge was creating an installer that worked on both platforms allowing us to install the Print Show directly onto the user's desktop where it would be easily accessible. Warren had to learn how to build an installer while working on the movies at the same time.

What are three things that led to the project's success?

• User feedback from previous versions of Flash tutorials gave us quite a bit of information on how we could improve the movies.
• Macromedia Flash is a great cross-platform tool for building our movies and deserves some of the credit. It is more than just a Web content utility; it creates self-contained applications that are stable and look great on both Windows and Macintosh systems.
• We have an extremely supportive environment. Our management is always encouraging us to staying on the leading edge of the industry, constantly helping us to improve our documentation, and allows us to go in new directions to communicate information that we haven't explored in the past.

What would you do differently in the future?

In the future we plan to include native Mac OS X versions of the movies. I also learned the hard way that you have to crop screen captures to the exact pixel before animating them, or they'll shift around all over the screen.

If you had to give advice to a new tech writer, what would it be?

There's more to technical writing than just creating printed manuals, especially in the future, as costs must decrease for documentation. Learn how to communicate in several mediums, and learn to think visually, not just through text. For example, Warren and I are primarily writers, not artists or programmers, yet we were able to create technical "documentation" beyond the written word.

What did you enjoy the most about the Touchstone Awards event?

I enjoyed meeting people from all of the really cool Northern California tech companies. Warren enjoyed the brunch and getting to bask in the glow of warm applause.

The Devil Mountain Views -- May/June 2002
(ebstc.org/newsletter/front.html)
For  suggestions, complaints, or (especially) compliments, contact dmveditor@spire.com