The The Let's Hear It! Podcast is covers the world of foundation and nonprofit communications, and I have known Eric Brown, one of the hosts for more years than I can count. So I was excited to be asked on as a guest to talk about effective presentation design with a particular bent towards the nonprofit world which I have been working in for as many years as I have known Eric.

It's a great and funny conversation that has covering a lot including why you want to "make your content like a Twinkie."

Take a listen! 

As we all communicate online more and more, I see some people nervous about "doing it right."While you should try for clear sound, well-lit video and a clean shirt, you don't necessarily have to set your home office up like the evening news. I've been coalescing around the idea that there is a continuum of communications and a lot of gray areas even within the same software platform. And it's okay to  slide along this continuum and ramp up your effort accordingly:

Stephanie Evergreen will soon be out with another book for the data visualization community (to coincide with the second edition of her phenomenal first book Effective Data Visualization). This one is called The Data Visualization Sketchbook, and in it Stephanie gives readers multiple templates for use in assembling data reports, handouts, dashboards, presentations and more.The templates and overall approach are a nice reminder that diving into Tableau or Word or PowerPoint is not always the best or most efficient course of action. Sometimes getting pencil and paper out helps organize your data and information and simplify your message.Below are a couple of Stephanie's templates I used to prep for an upcoming data report project.

Take a look and also take a look at Stephanie's site for tons of great info on visualizing data.

Episode #71, Revisions and  File Versioning – How Many? is up and live!Troy, Sandy and I talk about how to set client expectations for and handle revisions.

Take a listen!Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

 Episode #70, Presentations in the Courtroom with Kerri L. Ruttenberg is up and live!

Troy, Sandy and I welcome our first legal guest, Kerri L. Ruttenberg, to talk about trial graphics, how presentation is used in the courtroom and her fantastic book, Images with Impact: Design and Use of Winning Trial Visuals.

Kerri is a top DC litigation attorney and probably the top expert in using visuals in the courtroom in the country. I reviewed her book a while back when I first learned of it, but now we get to dive a bit deeper and hear more about the psychology of visuals, what can and can't be used in a courtroom and what the state of the trial graphics industry is.

Even if you never plan on working in this area of presentation design, this is a really good conversation in which you'll learn a ton not just about how to convince juries with visuals, but how to convince your own audiences.

Take a listen!Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

One of the questions I get asked most often is how can an average user create professional-looking infographics in PowerPoint. There are very good sites like Diagrammer, Canva and Infogram that can all help with providing and assembling elements of an infographic. And yes, you can always resort to PowerPoint's own SmartArt, but unless you use it simply as a starting point, it's going to look like...well, SmartArt. The disappointing truth is that to produce a professional looking infographic, you generally need to hire a professional. Enter Mike Parkinson and his brand new Build-a-Graphic add-in for PowerPoint.

Mike Parkinson runs Billion Dollar Graphics and is one of those professionals that has been creating custom infographics for high profile clients for years. He's got an excellent book on infographics and a brand new one on PowerPoint, but he has also just introduced Build-a-Graphic, a killer add-in for PowerPoint that allows any user to call upon a massive library of pre-made (professionally designed!) vector graphics all from within PowerPoint. If SmartArt is a tricycle, Build-a-Graphic is a Ferrari.

But it gets even better. Because while you can simply search through the catalog of ready-to-use graphic and insert them onto your PowerPoint slides, the tool can also examine your slide's content for you, automatically convert bullet points to more readable visual chunks and then suggest specific graphics relevant to your material. The quick demo below shows all this in action.

And all graphics are made up of pure PowerPoint shapes and vectors which means they are completely customizable, recolorable and can be taken apart however you like.

It's not an exaggeration to say that now that anyone can have professionally designed customized graphics with just a few clicks of the mouse.

The Build-a-Graphic add-in is a $99/year subscription which includes ongoing updates and additions to the graphic catalog. PC only for right now.

Factfulness by Hans Rosling is significant attention as well it should be. Of course, Bill Gates saying it is "one of the most important books" he's ever read doesn't hurt.

Like any reader, I imagine, I had my eyes opened continually about misconceptions about the world--which is the intent of the book. But, I'll always remember Hans Rosling not only for what he said, but how he said it. His TED Talks are famous for his energy, but also for the demos of his Gapminder software that animates bubble charts. Rosling was able to visualize data in such an accessible way, and I wanted to point out two of my favorite examples of how he implemented visual storytelling in Factfulness.

The Chimpanzee

The book is premised on the survey results to a series of questions that Rolling asked audiences all over the world. Predictably, no matter what their education or background, people fundamentally have misperceptions about the world and facts. Each question only has three possible answers, and he makes the point over and over that even a chimpanzee answering the quiz will get on average 33% correct answers. But as we see, even the most educated audiences often score lower than a random guess because of bias. And so, Rosling will add in on the x-axis a "Chimp Point" showing were random correct responses should lie. Here's an example.

The Picture Superiority Effect in Action

Much of the book revolves around the four income levels as defined by the World Bank which breaks down essentially as:Level 1: $1/dayLevel 2: $4/dayLevel 3: $16/dayLevel 4: $64/dayYou could chart or describe with words these four levels in a million different ways, but Rosling breaks it down to the simplest explanation with pictures of what it means at different levels to sleep or eat or brush your teeth. Here's a grid showing just what it means...It's a good and fast read, and I definitely recommend it.And if you want to make animated bubble charts a la Rosling, you can do so in PowerPoint with this hack.

Storytelling with Data has a nice collection this month of bar charts in every shape and size.

Daniel Crouch Rare Books has a catalog of various data visualization offerings including a nice  collection of Minard works for a hefty £400,000. Some of the works I was unfamiliar with and yes, a copy of the Napoleon map is one of them. You can purchase the catalog from their site and download a PDF here.

Looks like TASS has taken a break from manipulating US politics to create a really amazing interactive analysis of Minard's Napoleon March to Moscow graphic.Incredibly well-done, researched and informative. Also check out this paper on the Minard graphic I recently found.

Always read the footnotes!Thanks to Alberto Cairo for a footnote in The Truthful Art pointing me to this small paper by Michael Friendly on Charles Joseph Minard and his famous graphic of Napoleon's disastrous 1812 Russian march.

Check it out!

I'm really excited to be attending "Visual Trumpery," a talk by Alberto Cairo hosted by the NYC Data Visualization Meetup group.If you're not a member of the Meetup group, you can register on Eventbrite here.

Spread the word!

There's a new podcast in town all about data and technology and how it shapes our world. And guess what? I'm the inaugural guest for episode 1.

Data Talks is hosted by Ashutosh Nandeshwar, an analytics guru, PhD and data specialist.Take a listen as we talk about visual storytelling and make sure to subscribe and rate it.

And if you aren't a subscriber to The Presentation Podcast, um...why aren't you a subscriber to to The Presentation Podcast? 

A visual will almost always trump text, but sometimes text functions as a visual itself. The other day a client who offers a SaaS product called asking if there was a better way to show feature options across various versions than his current tabled list. I can't show his list, but it was very similar to this from Quicken:

We've all seen things like this and the reason is that things like this work quite well in quickly comparing and contrasting in order to make a decision. This is a time when simple checkmarks or missing checkmarks serves as a highly informative visual story.

Today I received an email from Jim Johnson, a New Jersey gubernatorial candidate contrasting himself with his primary challenger. And I loved it. It was nearly all text, but the repetition of Murphy's limited diversity of experience was easily readable and served as a glanceable visual with a big story.Sometimes a table is simply the best choice. And sometimes text does communicate visually.

Ugh. The deceptive proportional shape rears its head again, this time courtesy of a Wall Street Journal ad I saw this weekend in the print edition. And to be clear, this is an add FOR The Wall Street Journal.

Any average reader looking at the above ad would know instantly that The Wall Street Journal dwarfs its competitors when it comes to reaching senior executives. But any data visualization professional (or mathematician), would know instantly that the Journal is being incredibly dishonest with their graphic. Why? Because the Journal is using the diameter of the circles as comparison rather than the area. And when you use the diameter, you're exaggerating and essentially telling a visual lie because of how readers process a chart like this.If you read the detail lower in the ad, the claim is made that WSJ has twice the reach of The New York Times. But when readers see sized circles, they assume the area of the circles is the indicator of the amounts being compared. We can do a quick test to see that that assumption would be completely wrong.:

Overlaying The New York Times circle on top of the WSJ, we see that nearly four of the Times's audiences would fit into that of the WSJ.

But wait, the WSJ only has twice the audience reach, right? Why is their circle so massive? Because...the WSJ wants to make their audience reach look much larger than it actually is. They want to use data visualization to fool readers into thinking they are even better than the Times in this metric than they actually are. And they do this by using the diameter of the circles.  

Yes, the diameter of the WSJ is 200% that of the Times. But that's not how these things work.

A proper use of proportional shapes for this data would look something like this: 

To make matters worse, Microsoft doesn't do the world any favors by tacitly allowing this kind of data deception. I can't speak for other data visualization software, but PowerPoint and Excel allow the user to choose either area or width when creating bubble charts--a type of proportional shape visualization.

If you're a user of Excel and PowerPoint, you can use bubble graphs to create proportional shapes for you and break apart the charts into shapes using some hacks, but a far easier way to create properly sized proportional shapes is to use my Proportional Shape Calculator tool--a simple Excel calculator you can download from the goodies page on this site.

Elijah Meeks (Data Visualization Engineer at Netflix) put together a survey on data visualization, but what I really liked was his below solution for those impossibly crowded stacked bar charts. This may be an output of some data software I don't use, but you could certainly do this in Excel with a little extra manual work.

Interesting insights into state of design from John Maeda.

Download PDF from Slideshare as slideshow rasterizes horribly.

And interesting poor data design practices. Come on, percentage axes not labeled as "%", missing axes, those sized circle things, legends...There is a point where removing too much from a data visualization causes is to take longer to read.

Well, this is cool, if not quite so user-friendly.

Courtesy of Data Is Beautiful.

Redditor ShinyTile points out that poor graphic design may have contributed to Sunday night's Oscar mixup.

I agree and took 5 minutes to redesign the card.

As ShinyTile points out, the Oscars logo catches the eye first, and in this context is entirely irrelevant to the purpose and usage of the card. I assume the cards are nice keepsakes (in addition to the statues), and so I'm okay with keeping the logo, but minimizing it and making it the last thing the eye might read. In its place at the top center, I would place the category in the same Oscar logo gold. That should be the first place the reader's eye goes and it should serve to confirm the category winner about to be announced. But immediately after the category is processed by the reader, the next thing is the winner and the first thing announced—big, bold and in all caps.

I'm okay with the title being all caps, but I would make the additional information (in this case the producer names), sentence cap as I think this is easier for the eye to read, especially with longer and more complicated names. The only things read aloud are in black and the other two items are in the less prominent gold.

Just a suggestion... 

Also, the LA Times points out that the mixup could also partially be due to poor envelope design.