Most of us respond to well-designed reports and presentations. Yet, we spend little time considering design in our documents. Design is not limited to people with specialized degrees and/or backgrounds. Everyone can produce eye-pleasing documents, graphs, and slide decks if they take the time to improve this skill and follow a design philosophy.
Often, finding a better representation of data marks the initial challenge. This website presents ways to organize and display data. You must ignore the discussion of doughnut charts and pie charts. Along with presenting data, the use of color should be considered.
Robin Williams presents CRAP design philosophy as an elegant approach to producing documents and slide decks that promote (rather than hinder) clarity in communication. Her books related to presentation and text serve as strong starting points. She offers additional books on this topic.
Stephen Few's efforts on dashboard design should be required reading for any analytics professional. His approach is similar to that of Robin Williams. Lea Pica's website, which contains links to her blog and podcast, and her presentation offer solid tips and a good starting point. For a more extended discussion (plus a well-designed text), Andy Goodman provides more discussion about presentations.
This folder contains curated slide decks that I have developed or have shared. Brian Cristina's slide deck on presenting data should be viewed for fantastic suggestions and (before and after) examples. Furthermore, the student slide decks include three examples from students who have applied design philosophy to their slide decks. Finally, Evan Peck takes a step-by-step approach to explain how to make a good graph in this thread.
This folder includes collected reports from a variety of sources that serve as positive examples of CRAP design philosophy. This folder contains negative examples of CRAP design philosophy as applied to reports. Finally, if you are looking for a font, this website will help you decide, and it provides mix-and-match assistance. This entry from Lea Pica explains how to embed Google fonts into PowerPoint and offers a basic suite of fonts.
