When you are working in your word processor, do you find yourself zooming in to edit the text then zooming out to see how the text sits on the pages?
Zooming out to see the whole page lets you review how you have clustered your concepts (clustered as paragraphs), how these clusters flow from one to another, and how page breaks affect the flow.
When you are editing, most screens are not big enough to show a full page at actual size, so you zoom in to work with the details of words and sentences.
This practice of zooming in and out is useful beyond page layout. When applied to conceptual work like business, marketing and communications strategy, it can give you both control over the details as well as maintaining the all important big picture view.
Not doing the zoom in/out thing in Word often results in pages with weird page breaks, or weird margins.
Not doing the zoom in/out thing in strategy often results in obvious yet missing details.
Watch Charles and Ray Eames’ classic film Powers of Ten:
