My friend, Kurt Wilson, and I just wrapped up a contract to revise a set of slides – and the graphs within – for a big international client I can’t name. Here I’ll walk through one of the original slides and our revision of it. Keep in mind that these…
Let’s say we’re interested in comparing how two groups – oh, teachers and principals – responded to a survey. One way to visually display that comparison would be a bar graph, where each question had two bars, one for teachers and one for principals. It’s helpful in some ways, but…
Most people fall into one of two camps on this issue: There are the newbies, who use animation with abandon to kartwheel text onto a slide. And then there are the veterans, who are so sick of kartwheeling they’ve rejected any slide animation on any computer anywhere in the…
PowerPoint tends to get a bad rap. You know, that whole “death by PowerPoint” thing. It probably isn’t what the marketing people at Microsoft are most fond of. But weak PowerPoints have much more to do with the user than with the platform. But what about alternatives – total breaks –…
I’m taking my normal in-person speaking engagements online and you can come. I’ll be presenting one 90-minute class per month and repeating this entire series every 4 months. You’ll even get a sneak peek of examples from my forthcoming book (don’t tell Sage). Here is the lineup: Reporting to be…
This year, the American Evaluation Association is loaded with a ton of great stuff. I’ll be speaking on the Potent Presentations Initiative and what makes great messaging, design, and delivery. I’m also really excited to see the closing session on Saturday, because AEA President Rodney Hopson is pulling together…
Earlier this summer we hitched a ride on the train to Chicago for a few days to enjoy that beautiful city before it turns blustery and cold for 6 months. As usual when traveling, walking around the city made me think of how it…
At this time last year I was putting the final touches on my dissertation manuscript format and preparing for my defense. I looked at the extent of graphic design use in evaluation reports. I gathered about 200 summative evaluation reports from the repository at Informal Science Education, trained…
No, not the fountain of youth. The font of truth. Wait, could there actually be a font that communicates truth? This little experiment explains that, yeah dudes, that might be the case. Back in July, Errol Morris conducted an experiment. He wrote, as usual, a column for the New York…
After 5+ years, which started as Michael Scriven’s assistant, I’m departing from The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University on August 31 to accommodate the major increase in my consulting around data visualization and evaluation reporting. I began the tedious effort of cleaning out my drawers and came up the…
