Visual Literacy Book Recommendations?

I am not a visual learner by nature but would like to improve my graphic design skills and create presentations that will appeal to visual learners. I have just been using public domain clip art and photographs in my Powerpoint presentations lately, which is more than I did two years ago, but know that there is room for improvement. I would like to become more sophisticated with graphical representation. I am planning on reading a few books by Edward R. Tufte over break --- Envisioning Information and Beautiful Evidence. Anyone out there have any other titles to suggest? Thanks in advance!

Audio quality in tutorials

I am happy to have finally finished my Moodle course, but know I need to go back re-record all the audiopresentations I recorded in Jing. I absolutely love Jing, it is such an easy, user-friendly product, but was unable to get it to work with my mic/headset! The only mic that would work with it was the mic that was embedded within my laptop, which has absolutely horrible sound.

When I used Captivate last summer, I had the exact opposite experience.... my laptop mic wouldn't work, so I had to purchase a headset at Radioshack to record my narration.

Captivate is a better program, since it will allow me to edit out my pauses and "ums and ahs", but it is much more difficult to publish, edit and and post Captivate files within Moodle.

I am still interested in Jing and will train my coworkers to use it next week. The learning curve is much faster for Jing and I think they will be more likely to use it to create fast follow-up screencasts for their face to face classes.

I just need to improve that sound quality....

The Media Engineer at work suggested that I try ordering "Snowball" microphones for the staff PCs. He says they are not too expensive ($100 each) and have excellent quality. I am going to try to see if I can get approval to buy them. I think improved sound quality will really enhance the class.