Most people design their everyday reports, briefs, and knowledge products the wrong way. Not because they’re bad at design. Because they’re trying to write and design at the same time. It’s a multitasking problem. Writing is hard. Design is hard. Doing both simultaneously — in the same document, on the same deadline — means you’re […]
Articles
How to Disseminate (in 2026)
Welcome person who wants to share something with others. I created this guide because I disliked pretty much every resource I could find about dissemination. I think they teach you the wrong way to do things simply because it sounds right. But sounding right and being right are not the same thing. Everybody is welcome […]
Theory of Use
Never before in history have we had so many tools and channels we could use to deliver research and evaluation insights directly to people who could actually use them. And yet, most organizations still rely on outdated and ineffective dissemination strategies. Now it’s easy to bash the organizations, but the truth is that our research […]
Systemic Report Failure: The Content Gap
Systemic report failure is when structures, formats, and habits consistently prevent reports and other resources from reaching the right people in ways they can actually use. In evaluation and research we treat this systemic failure as if it’s a skills issue. It’s not. Better charts, interesting stories, and well-designed PDFs are not enough to make […]
Broken Resource Theory
So I’m an information designer with a quantitative background who doesn’t care that much about charts and graphs. I used to to care a lot, and you will find some guidance on this site about chart design (this blog has been going since 2010 which is over half of my professional career). But over time […]
KIDS COUNT 2025 – Before and After
This is one in a series of before and after designs. With each post I take a real publicly available resource or report and adapt the writing, format, structure, and illustrations in order to increase the accessibility. You can see other before and after posts in the series by following this link. How it Started – […]