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FreshSpectrum - Data Design

Learn graphic design, data storytelling, qualitative visualization, UX design, and other stuff they don't teach you in grad school.

Become a Confident Data Designer

Helping program evaluators, researchers, and academics learn the creative stuff they don't teach in grad school.

A blog about graphic design, data storytelling, qualitative visualization, UX design, and other things that will help you engage an audience.

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Chris Lysy, Data Designer
A few of the organizations I have worked with in the past include:

Main Content

Expectations are changing.

For decades, creative expectations for data people have been really low.  A long report and a presentation was often “enough” to finish up most projects.

Now-a-days, researchers and evaluators are expected to design short, visual, engaging reports in a variety of formats.  And then share these reports with overwhelmed audiences across multiple platforms.

Very few data people were ever taught this creative stuff in school. But if you’re willing to take initiative, this isn’t just a challenge, it’s an opportunity. 

I didn't learn design in grad school.

My masters degree is in sociology. And there was nothing creative about my early career positions as a research assistant and data analyst.

But then I started blogging as a hobby. Which pushed me to learn web and graphic design. As my creative skills grew, my day job started to morph in unexpected ways.

I was still running frequencies, writing survey questions, and analyzing quantitative data but I was also getting asked to design infographics, illustrate slide decks, and take on all sorts of other creative projects.

Teaching myself design created so many opportunities. It led to promotions, new positions, and, eventually, a successful independent consulting business.

And what I’ve learned teaching this creative stuff to other data people, is that it doesn’t just work for me. It can work for you too.

Learn design and you can expect the unexpected wins.

These are the first steps and I'm sure I will get better at information design as I practice and get feedback.

However, even this was enough to get asked to teach this internally next year.

After I showed a few examples to a friend from my university who also runs a small consultancy that provides services mostly to government agencies he invited me to teach this to his staff (which I'll get paid for).

I seriously didn't expect that when I started learning how to make writing/data easier to read.

-Workshop Participant

We started out with a single evaluator for one large grant, and in the last year we have grown to a team of six people evaluating grants across the institution.

My team's early reports were typically about 25 pages of narrative describing seven survey responses.

I did my best to untrain them from their years of writing courses, but it wasn't until I shared some of your cartoons and your book on report writing that the light really went on.

Now they create smaller, more digestible reports and infographics. Program leaders are very happy with the recent work coming from our team, and somehow I seem to be getting all the credit!

-Workshop Participant

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