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Briefs, not white papers
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Click here to cut to the chase, a proposed alternative to the traditional white paper I call a Brief.

books

The book on the left is the first paperback ever printed; the book on the right is John Seely Brown's The Social Life of Information. The format has hardly evolved at all in five hundred years. Black & white, single column, uniform font, and no pictures. It's hard to imagine making less progress, a theme I explored three years ago and documented at the Center for Visual Learning.

Upon seeing the stunning "Manifestos" at ChangeThis, I asked if I could borrow their format and was told it was proprietary. Fair enough. So I set about making my own. After several false starts, here's a first step toward an alternative to the traditional white paper.



I call this form a Brief.

A Brief is a less-is-more, visually enticing, standalone preentation designed for the individual reader.



The sample here is in FlashPaper2. It requires no special skills beyond an eye for design and attention to detail. The file is 14% of the size it would be as a pdf.

The first Brief

In the spirit of Open Source, here's the PowerPoint that generated the first Brief. Please share template improvements with the world at large.

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