Tight Five

Your boss has high hopes but a lot going on, so needs you to keep to a tight five. Long enough to say what needs to be said but short enough to preserve schedules and stay on agenda.

Read More

Will Amazon Lift Their Ban on PowerPoint?

When Jeff Bezos said in his 2018 annual letter to stakeholders, “We don’t do PowerPoint,” you could almost hear the stock price of Microsoft sliding downward. Presentation designers around the world started looking for second jobs. CEOs in other organizations started to follow suit, because whatever Bezos does is…

Read More

5 Shifts from Presentation to Webinar

Well, here we are. In the Fall. At a time when, back in Spring, we might have thought we’d be gathering in person again. Now that awesome presentation you planned to give has gone virtual and you’re on Zoom instead of standing in real life in front of a crowd…

Read More

Makeover: Health Data Edition

By far, my favorite emails to receive are from clients bragging about the beauty and impact of their work after our workshop. I just got one of these the other day from Becca Scranton at Arizona Department of Health Services. After thanking me for the workshop, she wrote, “Thanks to…

Read More

How We Unintentionally Perpetuate Inequality Part 3

Last week a friend told me the story of a well-intentioned nonprofit that designed teaching materials for Native American populations, in which they unintentionally perpetuated inequality. He described one piece that included a picture of the scales of justice. I didn’t get the significance, so he explained that while most white…

Read More

Exporting Graphs from Excel

I love when readers send me questions that I can turn into blog posts. The question: We often make our graphs in Excel and pop them in to reports or slides, but the transfer usually causes the formatting to get all wonky. How can we get print-quality graphics out of…

Read More

Timelines, 4 Ways

The least helpful timelines I’ve ever seen are these: where time is basically bulleted, as if each of these intervals is equidistant and as if a bunch of text is the best way to communicate something inherently not based in narrative. You are basically saying, this journey is…

Read More

What I Do: Before and After Business Slides

I help people design the best visual supports for streamlined conversations and decision-making. That’s just what New Client needed. He called to say “I need to look great at this meeting.” And by the time he got to that meeting, he looked great *and* he presented his qualitative and quantitative data…

Read More

The Difference Between Sloppy and Pro

This is the hardest part of design to get right. It’s what differentiates sloppy, weak design from that which looks tight. It’s the use of a grid. Arrangement matters. It’s the sort of thing that gets talked about in design workshops, but people tend to get so caught up by…

Read More