Ever start your eval presentation, peek behind you at the screen, and notice it doesn’t look anything like what you designed back in your office? Or open a report from an email attachment and wonder how your colleague PDFd it looking that way? The issue is typically due…
It’s time to write this post. This may be the most frequently asked question in my workshops on evaluation reporting, data visualization, and graphic design. Â What do I think about Prezi? Most people’s first reaction to being in the audience of a Prezi presentation is “Wow, that…
Time to tackle some of the more important parts of life. I saw this delivery schedule in a cooler at a DC Whole Foods. Bell’s Beer is from Kalamazoo and we take pretty big pride in our hometown beer. So we (I mean, I) get really geeked when…
We all love to see large engaging images in evaluation reporting, but it sure can be a pain in the butt to be the one behind the computer monitor, scrolling through pages of images in search for the right one. Typically, this process takes weeding through a lot of eye-strain…
A few weeks ago I was letting the sunshine in Miami love me (well, it was mutual) when my partner commented that Miami really has it’s own color scheme and font, beyond it’s famed art deco architecture. It’s always been a touch puzzling to me when designer people talk about expressing…
The next time someone asks me how good data visualization actually contributes to a better bottom line, I’m going to retell this story. Some time ago, I sat in a meeting with 11 other people. We were reviewing evaluation findings, presented via charts, which were created by another…
Toy designers beware. Do not put your products into my little dude’s hands because I am an ex-teacher AND now I’m a professional evaluator AND I care about design. Look, just LOOK, at this deck of cards my son came home with. Notice the problem (aside from the…
I went to my favorite city in the world a couple of weeks ago – Washington DC. Of course, I didn’t have enough time to explore everything I’d wanted, which included the new Museum of African American History and Culture. But I did catch the promotional signage in the Metro…
As much as I advocate for minimalistic slide design, sometimes that just can’t happen. Sometimes you’ve gotta have a lot of words or a logic model or diagram to show. I previously showed one strategy for handling this – the Slow Reveal. But incrementally revealing parts of a complex…
Report card time in the Evergreen household! We have a kindergartener, so this is our first venture into decoding the marks representing his progress. Among other assessments, he’s given a standardized test throughout the year to measure his emergent literacy. Because it looks nothing like the rest of the report…
