Icons or symbols are an “easy” way to organize information throughout an evaluation report. I say “easy,” but I really mean easy for the reader. Symbol sets provide mental organizational structure. They often aren’t so easy for the report author, though. Usually it can be difficult to find a set…
Dealing with potential audience colorblindness isn’t as mysterious as it seems. (And as an added bonus, by way of handling colorblindness, you’ll also fortify your work against the dim bulb in the projector or the color settings on the presenter laptop that skew your established color scheme.) One product,…
Most of the time I advocate for replacing words with images when presenting slideshows. But sometimes the slide just needs to have a lot of words, like this: But when we have a lot of words on a slide and we’re truly trying to get people’s…
Listen, I did it too. Back in my early days of reporting data, I filled pages with 3D charts. I was so freakin bored with all the lengthy narrative, I knew I needed to punch things up if my audience was going to stay engaged with my data. Heck,…
Two years ago I ran this tiny contest on my social networking platforms for the worst font ever. Far and away, Comic Sans was the winner. Here are the others that deserved mention, along with the messages they tend to communicate: Jokerman: Also says “Fajitas Tonite!” (spelled with…
Here’s a procedure I use all the time to help me select color combinations for my reporting. It makes use of this great, free, online program that takes all the scientific color theory stuff and translates it for those of us without a MFA. First, I head to my client’s…
I’ve been pretty vocal about the need for greater use of images in our evaluation communications. And while I can get most people to vow to halt the use of clip art, finding high-quality images can be a total pain. What’s at our fingertips (i.e., available on Google Images) is…
Seth Godin recently published a blog post on the atomic method of creating slides. He put into words what many of us have felt about the overuse of bullet points. But more than talk about it, he detailed a method for actually moving from a typically bullet-pointed slidedeck to…
If research gives just the facts, evaluation is distinct in that it often has an extra layer of interpretation and communication. We don’t just tell people 63.8% of students passed the class, we say “so what?” and interpret whether that 63.8% is good, worse, or whatnot.
