How to actually create stuff.
Are you interested in design? On this page you will find blog posts on topics like design accessibility, user experience design, graphic design, human centered design, and data design.
"Let's take a shortcut back to the car." I was 19 and hiking through the woods with one my best friends. We were both eagle scouts, and had spent much of our young lives wandering through the …
Continue Reading about The Evaluation Mindset: The Role of the Evaluator →
Describing how a process works is valuable for two reasons. It forces you to make sure you know how it works. Then it forces you to take the reader through the same sequence of ideas and deductions …
Continue Reading about The Evaluation Mindset: Charting a Course →
When I started getting into data visualization design, human centered design, and user experience design I had this hope that a better understanding of design methodologies would ultimately help me to …
Continue Reading about The Evaluation Mindset: Actions and Consequences →
So what if you created reports the same way publishers created magazines? That's the question behind today's post. Here is a link to Canva magazine templates. Things to keep in …
Continue Reading about Report Design as Magazine Design [Graphic Novel Blog Post] →
In today's graphic novel blog post I talk about the underlying challenge that drives my work. …
Continue Reading about Confession Time: I’m not a reader [graphic novel blog post] →
If we chose clothing the way we chose charts, we would all look the same. How dull. My contention, there is no single right chart or wrong chart, that said, here is how I go about …
Continue Reading about Chart Choosing Advice [Graphic Novel Blog Post] →
Understanding context is important when designing, with or without data. And overwhelm is an almost universal challenge in our oversaturated contemporary digital culture. Did you …
Continue Reading about Rule 1: Everyone is Overwhelmed [Graphic Novel Blog Post] →
So I live in North Carolina, luckily a bit in-land, not by the coast and not in a flood plane. With an impending Hurricane Florence, I'm a bit worried about the people in the eastern part of the …
Let's not overthink Tableau. It's a tool, and as a tool it can do some pretty cool things. But only if you have a reason to use it. Over the upcoming weeks I'm going to focus on specific …
Continue Reading about How to use Tableau as a Simple User Interface for Data →
Every time I drive to visit family in Maryland I sit in DC traffic and think..."I wish we could teleport." Unfortunately, as far as I know, teleportation is not possible. At one point in time, …
Years ago I launched a digital workshop. My goal was to teach evaluators and researchers how to design, based on the challenges that evaluators who design would face. It was exactly how I found …
Continue Reading about Why the world needs you to become a catalyst. →
My favorite bad chart sat nearly undisturbed for years in the kitchen cabinet of my former workplace. It was an almost ordinary looking bar chart adorning the side panel of a big yellow box of Lipton …
Continue Reading about Data Visualization Lessons from a Bad Chart →
