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, …
Why the world needs you to become a catalyst.
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 …
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Data Visualization Lessons from a Bad Chart
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 …
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Last Minute Presentation Design
So you did it again. You had months to draft your story, create your slides, and practice your talk. But here you are, a few days away from the big moment and not even close to ready. But don't …
Holistic Content Marketing – A Comic Journey
So what do I do for clients (a.k.a. what is holistic content marketing?) So often consultants and small organizations look at the web as a big time suck. Which is often very …
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Presentation White Space
I drew this one with just the sillyness in my head, but then I thought more about it. I think presentation white space is the banter you have with your audience at a time when you could be …
Why simply defining evaluation is not enough.
So I've only been independent for half a year but I've certainly learned one thing. If you have to spend a lot of time defining or explaining something, it's going to be a hard sell. Which brings …
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One-Pagers and Free Courses
So I decided to make a few tweaks to my workshop. Instead of offering free weekly webinars, I'm switching to offering temporary free courses. Basically I'll be making the short animated courses I …
Want better visuals? Make the process cheaper, easier and faster.
Saying that we should budget more money or time towards data design is like saying we should increase teacher pay. You can get a lot of nodding heads from decision makers but when it comes time to …
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Creating GIFs to Explain Charts
So who has time to read the small print? We are in an age where even large print is rarely read. Unfortunately there a lot of really good charts that require at least a little bit of …
Gone Workshoppin’
So there's this thing I gotta do. You know that whole creative workshop for data people thing that I started? I've come to the realization that if I want it to be successful, I need to give it …
Letting Pixar’s rules of storytelling influence your reporting.
I really believe that good data visualization, good reporting and good presentations are all about good storytelling. So I tend to search out inspiration from great storytellers. I read the post I …
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