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Before & After: Jody Fitzpatrick’s Presidential Keynote Slides

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Stephanie Evergreen — 3 Comments ↓

I get the lucky privilege of working with the president of the American Evaluation Association on his or her keynote slidedeck. I love this small project each fall for a couple of reasons. Thus far, the presidents I’ve worked with have been wicked smart and eager to see the field grow and working with clients like that rocks. Also, they readily admit they need help with their slides. This year, I collaborated with Jody Fitzpatrick. We were starting from scratch – no existing slide content to have to reshape. So I asked her to rough out her content on each…

Tagged with: makeover, PowerPoint, reboot, slide deck, slides, slideshow
Posted in charts, color, Communicating Findings, Evaluation, font, slideshows

Data Nerd Holiday Cards

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Stephanie Evergreen — 3 Comments ↓

Do you sit around with your data nerd friends and come up with funny statistics- and data visualization-based jokes? No? Maybe it’s just me. But to your benefit! I illustrated those nerd jokes and put them on holiday cards, available on Redbubble. Click the pic to go shopping. Here’s one for your favorite data nerd sweetheart: Here’s one for your dataviz friends (note the acceptable use of a pie chart): And one more for your clients, to remind them that you are not just any nerd, but a humorous and thoughtful one at that: You can order 4″ x 6″…

Tagged with: Christmas, data geek, datanerd, holiday cards, New Year
Posted in charts, Communicating Findings, Evaluation

Slidedeck Planning Sheet

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Stephanie Evergreen — 2 Comments ↓

Holster that mouse! Before you crack open PowerPoint to crank out some slides, take a step back and sketch. Your time in front of the computer will be far more productive (as in, you’ll save hours roaming stock photo sites) if you think through your slides on paper before you design them electronically. I used to just print off a blank slidedeck of six slides on one page from PowerPoint and start my sketching. You’ll see here that I’m not making anything super beautiful or artistic. Those are really crude sketches! They eventually turned into this deck: And the slide…

Guest Post: Word Cloud Dog Vomit, An Illustrated Rant

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Stephanie Evergreen — 10 Comments ↓

My colleague Humphrey Costello delivers the funniest, snarkiest Ignite sessions at the American Evaluation Association’s annual conference. I’m so happy to give him this platform to articulate the answer to one of the questions I am asked the most, about the phenomenon known as word clouds. 1st ingredient: Long ago, I promised Stephanie a blog entry on word clouds. 2nd ingredient: AEA 2013 just happened. 3rd ingredient: It was a thrill to find the latest copy of New Directions on data viz in my mailbox. Congratulations to Tarek, Stephanie, and everyone else involved! Blend: Here is a word cloud of…

Tagged with: dataviz, qualitative data visualization, word cloud, wordle
Posted in charts, color, Communicating Findings, font

Organize your Reporting with a Style Sheet Template

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Stephanie Evergreen — 1 Comment ↓

Dudes, I know report writing is no small task. It takes lots of people working on different parts – sure. But so often I see reports that look like they’ve been Frankensteined: different fonts and colors in each section, barely stitched together into a cohesive whole. One way graphic designers keep a team on the same mental page is through the use of style sheets. Style sheets dictate the way a report will look and feel, by specifying exact colors, fonts, font sizes, logos, etc. The most comprehensive style sheets I’ve seen even detail the type of imagery that will…

Posted in color, Communicating Findings, font

Design for Federal Proposals (aka Design in a Black & White Environment)

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Stephanie Evergreen — 1 Comment ↓

I just finished a round of reviews for a major federal grant program and was, like every year, inspired to share guidance on how to design in such a restrictive environment. Issue: Federal grant programs tend to specify the page margins, typeface, and font size to make the amount of content one can squeeze in to the proposal fairly equal for all. Those restrictions make my usual suggestions about bringing attention to key information fairly moot. What can you do? Solutions: Your emphasis options now consist of all caps, italics, underlining, and bolding. DO NOT EVER USE ALL FOUR AT…

Posted in charts, color, Communicating Findings, Proposals

Finding Fonts & Passing Them On

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Stephanie Evergreen — 2 Comments ↓

Sometimes (okay, lots of times) you may find that you need something beyond the default fonts loaded onto your computer. None of these. But other solid, free for commercial use fonts can add the right flavor to your evaluation reports and presentations. My favorite places to locate free fonts are Font Squirrel and da font (all of which are not for commercial use). So let’s say you find the perfect font. You’ve downloaded it and now you need to email it to your IT guy or your report co-authoring superhero colleague (so long as the license allows you to do so).…

Tagged with: Mac, Pc, type, typeface
Posted in Communicating Findings, Evaluation, font

Rule of Thirds Template for Slide Layout

Posted on September 4, 2013 by Stephanie Evergreen — 7 Comments ↓

While it’s best to sketch a few ideas before you even hit the power button on your computer, once you do open your slideshow software, head first to the slide master and rearrange the default slide layouts into something more attention-grabbing. Try using the Rule of Thirds. The Rule of Thirds is a layout idea that comes from the field of photography. It essentially divides the slide into three horizontal rows and three horizontal columns. There are a couple of different ways to use the Rule of Thirds. Some people will let it guide where to put images, such that…

Tagged with: Guide, layout, PowerPoint, Rule of Thirds
Posted in Communicating Findings, slideshows

How to Make a Diverging Stacked Bar Chart in Excel

Posted on August 21, 2013 by Stephanie Evergreen — 15 Comments ↓

Last week my friend Ann Emery posted a dataviz challenge on something I’d been wanting to figure out for a long time: how to make a diverging stacked bar chart in Excel (I’d also heard of them as sliding bar charts, but getting our dataviz terminology on the same page is another blog post). Diverging stacked bar charts are great for showing the spread of negative and positive values, such as Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree (without a Neutral category) and because they align to each other around the midpoint, they handle some of the criticism of regular stacked bar…

Evaluation Executive Summaries & Reports

Posted on August 7, 2013 by Stephanie Evergreen — 6 Comments ↓

Examples of great evaluation reports and executive summaries ranks as one of the top questions I get by email. What’s a good exec sum look like? How long should it be? How do I incorporate graphics into a report without looking like a marketing firm? Read on, friends. I’ve pulled together some examples for you. Note! None of these are perfect. Pick away at them as much as you’d like, Internet. But you asked me for some examples, so here you go. Get inspired. Here is a one-page executive summary, almost dashboard-like, from Greg Gauss at the Battle Creek Community…

Tagged with: evaluation, executive summary, report
Posted in Communicating Findings, Evaluation

Before & After: Jody Fitzpatrick’s Presidential Keynote Slides

Data Nerd Holiday Cards

Slidedeck Planning Sheet

Guest Post: Word Cloud Dog Vomit, An Illustrated Rant

Organize your Reporting with a Style Sheet Template

Design for Federal Proposals (aka Design in a Black & White Environment)

Finding Fonts & Passing Them On

Rule of Thirds Template for Slide Layout

How to Make a Diverging Stacked Bar Chart in Excel

Evaluation Executive Summaries & Reports

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