Friday, March 6, 2009

Omnigraffle Vs. Visio

Exciting times! It's March, which means I officially have something due at the end of the month. The literature review should come together just fine... and with that out of the way, I'll be free to work on floorplans. Which, not so coincidentally, are the subject of today's post! Whoda thunk it.

Earlier this week I went to an IT lab short course on two multipurpose graphic design/information visualization programs: Omnigraffle, for the Macintosh by Omnigroup, and Microsoft's Visio. I found one thing really intriguing about the meeting: how the (not quite dueling) different focuses of the iSchool were on full display. Omnigraffle, you see, is great for taking abstract concepts and turning them into visual representations: mind maps, design workflows, whichever. As a result, it was talked up left and right during the session as an important and useful program- very cutting edge, and so forth. Visio received less attention, because it was more grounded and focused on practicalities... you know, stuff like drawing up floorplans and blueprints. Guess which one I'll be using! I guess I'm the John Hodgman in this situation. So it goes!

Visio has a very complicated interface, as one might expect, but I managed to sort of get the hang of it even in the short time spent at the lab. It has a setting for 'Office Layout' that will pretty much be perfect for a library, since it includes bookshelves and so on. And speaking of furniture, a bit of room has been made in the budget! There's a bit left for a crack at a library entryway, so I'm going to be cruising furniture sites for a good 'L' shaped desk and some magazine wracks when I get the chance. New, more detailed blueprints of the floor space have also showed up here at the center, so once I get a hand of those I can start laying out the exact square footage in Visio and rearranging. I'm looking forward to it!

1 comment:

  1. Very funny about mac/pc...but more so, the "vision thing" vs practical get the job done issues. Ah librarianship...ever fraught!

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