The following is an excerpt from our three-part series: "A Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use". It is chock full of best practices and practical tips for designing dashboards. This particular nugget is something we've used to great effect and wanted to make sure our readers didn't miss out simply because they were afraid of ending up on our mailing list. There is even a movie version.

We’d like to offer a simple framework for effective use of fonts in your dashboard. With a few simple decisions, you can ensure that the text on the dashboard will both look good and communicate effectively. The majority of text on the page falls into four categories:

• Body text is clean, readable content
• Headers separate and name major sections of your work
• Notes describe additional things the reader should be aware of. These should fade into the background unless we call attention to them.
• Emphasis text is what we want our reader to pay particular attention to.

The following table describes an approach for deciding how to display each of these text types. The yellow highlights indicate where you need to make decisions.

It comes down to three basic decisions:

• Choose size and font of the body text
• Decide if the header is going to flip to serif or sans-serif—and whether it is going to have any style
• Decide what to do about emphasis—color or (bold or italic)

A few things things don't fit neatly into one of the four text categories listed above, such as table headers and graph titles. We tend to use a combination of styles to handle these exceptions.

Stick to this framework and we guarantee your dashboard will look better. Take a look at this example, starting with a standard-looking Excel report without out much thought put toward the fonts:

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The following version of the same report cleans up the table, chart, and fonts:

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A final version uses Georgia for the title font and brings in a new emphasis color. The result: a totally different but equally clean and readable report.

Several weeks ago we published Part 1: Foundation of our Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use, and a couple of weeks after that we released Part 2: Structure. Today, we're making Part 3: Information Design available for download. In this part, we provide practical tips for putting information on the page in a way that communicates effectively to your audience.

If you've already registered, you will be receiving this volume automatically via email. However, if you've been waiting for "a better deal", you're in luck. Right now, you can download all three parts for FREE! That's right, free. As in $0. And we're waiving the shipping and handling charges as well. Just click here to register and get your copy today!

(For those of you who are paying attention, we didn't actually charge for the first two parts either. They've always been free, but sometimes folks need to feel like they're getting a good deal. If you really want to give and get free stuff, check out freecycle.org - through it's "reuse" charter, it helps our environment by keeping good stuff out of the landfill.)

Thanks again for reading!

It's been a busy summer for us here at Juice with more and more companies asking us to help them take their data and create dashboard applications that help them get more done. While working on these accounts, we've seen an ever increasing interest and awareness in proper dashboarding techniques.

We believe that the best software is the software that people like love to use. Typically they “love it” because it helps them get their job done quicker and/or better. This can be for any of a number of reasons, but it’s great to see that buyers are becoming less satisfied with junky information applications.

So, we've decided to share the wealth. We've decided to compile many of the design tips we've harvested from our client projects over the years. These learnings are collected into a 3 part paper entitled A Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use (catchy, isn't it?). We've written this to help people who want to create information applications that break out of the horrible constraints of the industry-standards we've all seen and have been disappointed with.

We've made this paper available to folks who we've done business with or who have registered with us in the past, but we didn't want our readers to be left out. If you didn't receive an invitation to download the paper (maybe because you're one of those lurkers out there -shame on you ;-) now's your chance to be part of the "in crowd". If you're interested, register to download your own copy of Part 1: Foundation. For those who register, we'll be mailing Parts 2 (Structure) and 3 (Information Design) over the next few weeks.

We think you'll find it really useful and hope you'll let us know how it helps you communicate your information more effectively.

I'm a big fan of the work they're doing over at Duarte Design. Great, practical, motivating presentation design practices. Rarely do I come away from their site un-inspired about something.

Recently, Nancy Duarte participated in an interview with Jimmy Guterman of the MIT Sloan Management Review, which resulted in the article "How to Become a Better Manager By Thinking Like a Designer" (sign up is required). The quote that summarizes the article is:

“Often managers… rely heavily on data and information to tell the story and miss the opportunity to create context and meaning…leaving lots of room for interpretation, which can spawn multiple cycles and limit advancement.”

It's the same with information presentation. A focus on design at the beginning expands the ability to deliver context and meaning. But before you discount design as a concept for well, you know, "those artsy types", keep in mind, as Nancy puts it:

"Design is... crafting communications to answer audience needs in the most effective way."

What this means is that the more you focus on design, the more you'll "speak" to your audience - which means you'll be more effective with your data presentation. It's about the audience, not you.

Here are some dashboard design principles that we use (with a few enhancements from Nancy's interview) to make sure we become better information presenters by thinking like designers:

• Unity/Harmony - a sense that everything in the application belongs together, resulting in a "whole" that is greater than the sum of the parts. All the elements complement, augment, and enhance, as opposed to distract and detract from each other.

  Takeaway: Identify the problem you're solving and make sure every element you place moves you closer to answering that question.

• Proximity/Hierarchy - Things that are near each other are related. Hierarchy demonstrates relationships between items where appropriate. Proximity and Hierarchy both provide tremendous contextual cues leading to better understanding.

  Takeaway: Place related things near each other and separate unrelated things. Remember, dogs and cats don't play well together.

• Clear Space - White space in information display is very important and too often overlooked. Maximizing dashboard real estate means creating places for the eye to "rest" so that the non-white space is more effective.

  Takeaway: Use white space in conjunction with proximity to help your viewers follow the story the information is telling.

• Balance - Dominant focal points either give the viewer a sense of comfort (balanced) or spur them to action (unbalanced). Nancy points out "that does not mean all things must be in balance all the time. It is often effective to jar people and thereby effect a change in behavior or thought. Be aware, though, that once something has been thrown out of balance, it is the nature of the universe to find a new state of equilibrium."

  Takeaway: Make sure the primary focal points in your information presentation tell the viewer either "it's ok, move on" or "you need to do something."

• Contrast - Contrast creates interest to focus attention or highlight differences. Again quoting from the article "The value of contrast lies neither in the black nor the white, but in the tension between them."

  Takeaway: Use Contrast to shift Balance so the viewer focusses and acts more quickly.

• Proportion - More important elements deserve more real estate. It's tempting to want to present an unbiased view of the data. However, as Amanda Cox of the NYT graphics department stated at the OEDC "Seminar on Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge" "data isn't like your kids, you don't have to pretend to love them equally."

  Takeaway: Increase the size and emphasis of the values and decrease the size of labels and you'll find dramatically better impact and speed of understanding.

• Simplicity - Stay focused on the specific fact on which you're trying to shine light. This sometimes means showing less data and a simpler display. I think Garr Reynolds sums it up best: "Don't confuse 'simplicity', which is hard to achieve, with 'simplistic', which is easy and usually lacking value."

  Takeaway: Help your viewers focus on what's really important by pointing them to the kernels and not the chaff.

We were excited to see that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and his team used our open-source JuiceKit treemap on the recently released Federal IT Spending Dashboard.

While Tim O'Reilly mistakenly gave credit for all the visualizations to Fusion Charts, we know better. A mother always recognizes her baby. I bet Google also recognized their Motion Chart.