You want to know the secret to improving the quality of your charts, graphs, and illustrations? It’s simple. Create more than one chart, graph, or illustration. Then pick the best one. Or, in other words, formstorm it. Stop taking the easy way out. The following comes from a presentation given by John Cleese on Creativity […]
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Is your report too wordy? Don’t do this.
Have you been told your report is too wordy? Or maybe you received input that your report was “too long” or “not reader friendly.” And then perhaps you were given the advice, “make it shorter.” STOP! Don’t follow that advice. In this post I’ll tell you why making your report shorter is often bad advice, […]
Creating Fuzzy Icon Arrays
One of the cool things about teaching data design is that I get to personally learn from the people who take my workshops. Today’s concept comes from Celestyna Galicki. This is the second time I’ve featured one of Celestyna’s creations (see her post on Shadow Logic Models). If you have ever taken one of my […]
How to Use Icons in Reports
Icons can be a really easy and effective way to illustrate reports and visualize qualitative data. In this post I’ll share some examples, give you some icon use tips, and talk about some specific ways you can develop and use your own icons using Canva. In a previous blog post I talked about qualitative data […]
What is Data Design?
Do you want to become a confident data designer? The first step is probably understanding what data design even means. I shared the following definition when writing my blog post about how to become a data designer. But in this post, I plan to dig deeper. What is data design? Data design is a blend […]
Web Reports are Easier to Design than PDFs
Why are so many organizations still stuck in a PDF rut? I’ve been blogging since around 2008. For context, I started on WordPress well before I had my own business, years before I started drawing comics, and even before I really started getting into data visualization design. My first blog posts were about technology, data […]