Collaborative work

For me, I am always happy to work in groups instead of doing individual work. When working inside a group, there will always be great ideas while brainstorming thus I believe that the wisdom of crowds really exists. Moreover, we can share our thoughts and problems that we encountered so as to achieve a better performance. No matter in school assignments or in work places, It is always easier for me to work in group than individual. Well, it depends on which kind of group members I have, but luckily, most of the time my group mates are very nice.  =]

Talking about the working strategies in group projects, I guess most of us are more familiar with the parallel one. Because it is a fast and fair way to distribute duties and get things done quickly. In the internet world, I guess it is more or less the same despite of there is no obvious duty distribution. I am a Firefox user (Firefox introduction in Wikipedia),  I think it is a lot better than Internet Explorer (free download link: Firefox). However, before I attend this week’s lecture, I never know that Firefox is created by a group of volunteer but not a company. I wonder how can they collaborate successfully if there is no obvious division of labour? Why people know which part they have to do and how to make sure the works are perfectly done by different experts? Do they have meetings? I really wonder.

Font size & pictures

In these days, people tend to read pictures and interesting fonts instead of reading a text word by word. The old fashioned news times roman with all words size 12 makes a text become very dull and do not know where to start reading.

Take myself as an example, when I saw a magazine cover, I will read the biggest font first, as it is very eye-catching and I think the biggest font tell the most important information. Plus the picture aside, I guess I get the main idea of the story. Then I decide whether I want to read the details of story. From the magazine aside, the first thing I saw is the yellow fonts in the middle, it stands out from the black colour background, plus it has the biggest font size. This line is very eye-catching. It seems that this is the cover story as it tries to gain people's attention. As this is a cover page of magazine, the magazine wants to show the most interesting stories on the cover in order to attract people's consumption. Therefore, there are other stories listed in the bottom part. There is no distinction that the upper part is ideal and the bottom is realistic. The whole page is "real" information giving. (The information are real as they really exists inside the book, yet the stories may composed by the reporters  =P)

How about you? What does different font size and pictures mean to you? How do you read them?