Summary deck from our monthly JSI design-storm (design + brainstorm), highlighting the key features of Piktochart for designing visualizations to make information accessible.
The idea behind the infographic is simple; combine text, graphics and statistics to harness engaging information delivery. For small business, however, executing an infographic can be a bit daunting when you don’t have a graphic designer on staff. Here are three tech options that can help you put the graphic in infographics without hurting your budget.
Splicing images for web design is an important function that has several benefits for website architecture. It usually takes additional software program not bundled with Windows or Mac – at least, not if you want to splice images on anything other than a basic level. A few of the programs used for this are Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks and Adobe Illustrator; with Photoshop being the most popular.
The idea behind the infographic is simple; combine text, graphics and statistics to harness engaging information delivery. For small business, however, executing an infographic can be a bit daunting when you don’t have a graphic designer on staff. Here are three tech options that can help you put the graphic in infographics without hurting your budget.
Splicing images for web design is an important function that has several benefits for website architecture. It usually takes additional software program not bundled with Windows or Mac – at least, not if you want to splice images on anything other than a basic level. A few of the programs used for this are Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks and Adobe Illustrator; with Photoshop being the most popular.
August Designstorm: Alternative Reporting FormatsAmanda Makulec
Monthly brainstorm and idea sharing session at JSI around data visualization. The August deck focuses on alternative reporting formats and questions to think through to reach various audiences, including tools like interactive timelines, interactive graphics and dashboards (Tableau & others), scrolling/parallax webpages, and key design principles.
Chart Makeover: A Women's Nutrition Bar ChartAmanda Makulec
One of the most common requests I receive is to review charts and graphs and provide insight around how to improve them by using the formatting tools available in Excel.
This example shows the process of redesigning the chart to better facilitate comparison within regions of the trend towards a greater percent of women falling into the overweight and obese categories (from 1980 to 2008).
Interactive, clickable session highlighting how to apply design principles to Excel graphs to make a data story sing. Originally hosted as a brown-bag lunch presentation at JSI. For more detailed resources on designing various chart types in Excel, check out Ann Emery's Excel series and slide decks http://www.slideshare.net/annkemery/presentations.
Highlights from three different speakers on the actual use of dashboards for decisionmaking.
MEASURE Evaluation shares the results of a landscape analysis looking for specific examples of dashboards prompting action. BroadReach shares an example of how their Vantage platform is making HIV data accessible in South Africa. JSI shares an example of low-tech but high-impact dashboard development and coaching that has transformed districts in Zimbabwe.
A short workshop from MERL Tech 2016 on how we can think more purposefully about telling stories with our data and designing visualizations to bring those stories to life in global health and development.
Presented on May 7, 2015 to the TechChange Technology for M&E course. The aim of the presentation was to highlight key considerations in designing visualizations as part of international development programs, and includes both challenges of visualization in development programs and six things to consider when designing visualizations.
Population Health - Data & Visualizations for Decision MakingPeter Speyer
Measurement is key for population health management. Global Burden of Disease provides data on burden by disease, injury and risk factor in countries around the world.
Data visualization is about transforming numbers into knowledge, making information meaningful. I was one of 50 contributors to this free, Creative Commons licensed eBook, which provides a comprehensive overview of how to approach, develop, design, and publish great data visualizations.
Learn more about the project, interact with the eBook online, and get involved in future iterations at https://infoactive.co/data-design
Population health measurement - key takeaways from Global Burden of Disease s...Peter Speyer
Overview of the Global Burden of Disease study along with 8 key insights from turning 50K data sources into comparable measurements of health loss by country, age and sex. Insights range from finding, managing, and wrangling/prepping to analyzing and visualizing the results.
Data Visualization Design Best Practices WorkshopAmanda Makulec
Presentation shared at the #MA4Health Data Visualization workshop cofacilitated with my colleague Tahmid Chowdhury. Our aim was to empower participants with simple principles they can apply to any graph or chart to improve its effectiveness in communicating information, and to share resources on viz design relevant to global health practitioners.
August Designstorm: Alternative Reporting FormatsAmanda Makulec
Monthly brainstorm and idea sharing session at JSI around data visualization. The August deck focuses on alternative reporting formats and questions to think through to reach various audiences, including tools like interactive timelines, interactive graphics and dashboards (Tableau & others), scrolling/parallax webpages, and key design principles.
Chart Makeover: A Women's Nutrition Bar ChartAmanda Makulec
One of the most common requests I receive is to review charts and graphs and provide insight around how to improve them by using the formatting tools available in Excel.
This example shows the process of redesigning the chart to better facilitate comparison within regions of the trend towards a greater percent of women falling into the overweight and obese categories (from 1980 to 2008).
Interactive, clickable session highlighting how to apply design principles to Excel graphs to make a data story sing. Originally hosted as a brown-bag lunch presentation at JSI. For more detailed resources on designing various chart types in Excel, check out Ann Emery's Excel series and slide decks http://www.slideshare.net/annkemery/presentations.
Highlights from three different speakers on the actual use of dashboards for decisionmaking.
MEASURE Evaluation shares the results of a landscape analysis looking for specific examples of dashboards prompting action. BroadReach shares an example of how their Vantage platform is making HIV data accessible in South Africa. JSI shares an example of low-tech but high-impact dashboard development and coaching that has transformed districts in Zimbabwe.
A short workshop from MERL Tech 2016 on how we can think more purposefully about telling stories with our data and designing visualizations to bring those stories to life in global health and development.
Presented on May 7, 2015 to the TechChange Technology for M&E course. The aim of the presentation was to highlight key considerations in designing visualizations as part of international development programs, and includes both challenges of visualization in development programs and six things to consider when designing visualizations.
Population Health - Data & Visualizations for Decision MakingPeter Speyer
Measurement is key for population health management. Global Burden of Disease provides data on burden by disease, injury and risk factor in countries around the world.
Data visualization is about transforming numbers into knowledge, making information meaningful. I was one of 50 contributors to this free, Creative Commons licensed eBook, which provides a comprehensive overview of how to approach, develop, design, and publish great data visualizations.
Learn more about the project, interact with the eBook online, and get involved in future iterations at https://infoactive.co/data-design
Population health measurement - key takeaways from Global Burden of Disease s...Peter Speyer
Overview of the Global Burden of Disease study along with 8 key insights from turning 50K data sources into comparable measurements of health loss by country, age and sex. Insights range from finding, managing, and wrangling/prepping to analyzing and visualizing the results.
Data Visualization Design Best Practices WorkshopAmanda Makulec
Presentation shared at the #MA4Health Data Visualization workshop cofacilitated with my colleague Tahmid Chowdhury. Our aim was to empower participants with simple principles they can apply to any graph or chart to improve its effectiveness in communicating information, and to share resources on viz design relevant to global health practitioners.
How Scrum masters use an online whiteboard for user story mappingRealtimeBoard
The best practices that will help you to map users stories. Helpful advice and useful templates inside for scrum masters and agile team.
To learn more: https://realtimeboard.com/blog/how-scrum-masters-use-realtimeboard-for-user-story-mapping/
Vector to Bitmap Workflow for Surface DesignersElaine Polvinen
Fashion Education. Advantages of developing an understanding of Vector [Adobe Illustrator] and bitmap {Adobe Photoshop] images for integrated surface design development.
This slide was expertly created by SlideEgg with dark black background and golden yellow geometric patterns. The number of text blocks is sufficient to display your title and other notes.
A design talk geared towards designers who are new to the world of web design. I’ll cover items such as: how web design is unique from other kinds of design (such as print), how to leverage research and analytics to create data informed designs, steps to become a proficient web designer and how to choose and work with developers. If there are folks in the room using Illustrator or PSD, I'll show you how to set up Illustrator files for web design and prep files for a developer.
Borrowing from the communications and media experts, storyboarding is one of my favorite approaches to work through a data visualization design with a team. First identify your audience & what your data story is, then map it out visually to come to a common understanding of what your team is designing.
أدوات لبناء صور جذابة لمواقع التواصل الاجتماعيiClick Agency
تعرف على أدوات مهمة لتصميم وبناء صور جذابة لمواقع التواصل الاجتماعي . يحتوي العرض على أهم عشر أدوات تساعدكم في بناء محتوى لرفع مستوى التفاعل مع الجمهور على الشبكات الاجتماعية .
Breakout session at MERL Tech 2018.
Agile - commonly used in the tech community - offers a number of sticky ideas and principles we can adapt in international development and MERL to improve how we work and support adaptive management.
In this breakout, we focus on three sticky ideas: creating and being guided by user stories, prioritization, and limiting WIP.
Lightning talk presented at MERL Tech 2018.
Often we think of dashboards as interactive reports instead of being digital products.
By rethinking our criteria of success for launching a new dashboard and borrowing from UX design, we can think more meaningfully about how we build dashboards stakeholders actually want to use.
Developing Dashboards with User-Centered DesignAmanda Makulec
Design sprint session hosted at the TechLady Hackathon, focused on the basic principles and techniques for starting a design process with who will use the data, rather than the tables and tools.
Slides from an interactive workshop focused on exposing M&E practitioners to design thinking approaches to understand the needs and experiences of data users at MERL Tech 2017
A quick overview of two techniques from design thinking that can help us better tailor data visualizations to the needs of our audiences. Personas can be used to identify illustrative audience members who represent large groups within our target audience, and journey maps help us understand how an audience receives, interprets, and acts on information.
The illustrative example presented here is rooted in a real world experience, but is not an actual persona and journey used in that work.
Building your own skills is one step in strengthening how you use visualization in your work, but fostering organizational change can be hard. Here are a few quick considerations on how to nurture data visualization as a personal skill and as an organizational value, and tips for successful collaborations on data visualization activities.
Originally presented as part of the HC3 Innovation Webinar Series on March 8, 2017.
Designing Data Visualizations to Strengthen Health SystemsAmanda Makulec
Slide deck from our hands-on workshop hosted at the 4th Global Symposium on Health Systems Research, focused on basic design tips, tricks, and best practices to improve your charts and graphs.
Visualizations with Empathy: Developing Audience PersonasAmanda Makulec
Presentation from Evaluation 2016 featuring ideas for how evaluators (and other data viz designers) can use the develop of personas to segment and understand their audiences. Instead of thinking just of stakeholder groups and job titles, we approach understanding audiences by developing empathy, borrowing from human centered design.
Why People are the Heart of Health Innovation. Keynote presentation at the Boston College Public Health Innovation Symposium (19 March 2016). Highlighting how starting with what people want is key to successful health innovation, and how human centered design can help us do just that.
Designing Usage Dashboards for mHealth Program MonitoringAmanda Makulec
Presentation from the MERL Tech Panel on "Dashboards: Force for Good, Great, or Greater Confusion?" focused on the unique challenges of developing a dashboard of usage data from a mobile application.
A Data Viz Makeover: Approaches for Improving your VisualizationsAmanda Makulec
A joint presentation made at the 2015 USAID Global Health Mini University, introducing key data visualization concepts and setting the stage for two interactive activities on storyboarding for data visualizations and visual best practices for graph and chart design.
Thinking about how to communicate results from global health and development programs can be a challenge. By looking beyond long form, narrative, text reports, we can make our learning more accessible to wider audiences and promote the use of data for decision making by formatting our results in interesting, inviting ways. This deck includes a ideas, resources, and inspiration for great alternative reporting formats, including videos and SlideDocs.
An introduction to infographic design written for global health and development professionals, including ideas for storyboarding, design tools, and tips and tricks to create fun, meaningful infographics. Lots of links to free web-based tools and great resources.
A quick reference on designing data visualizations that delight and leverage best practices from the design world to ensure your data is presented in meaningful, usable, fun ways.
Understanding your audience and considering them in your design is essential for building great visualizations. This deck will walk you through the critical steps for identifying and understanding your audience, and developing a complex visualization storyboard to share your message.
Data Visualization Resource Guide (September 2014)Amanda Makulec
A summary guide to data visualization design, including key design principles, great resources, and tools (listed by category with short explanations) that you can use to help design elegant, effective data visualizations that help share your message & promote the use of your information.
Note that the tools & resources highlighted are suggested, and inclusion should not be considered as an endorsement from JSI.
Summary deck from our monthly JSI design-storm (design + brainstorm), highlighting the amazing templates and design features from Nancy Duarte's Slidedocs. The highlights features here only hit on a small section of her overall approach - check out the complete package at http://www.duarte.com/slidedocs
Explore our comprehensive data analysis project presentation on predicting product ad campaign performance. Learn how data-driven insights can optimize your marketing strategies and enhance campaign effectiveness. Perfect for professionals and students looking to understand the power of data analysis in advertising. for more details visit: https://bostoninstituteofanalytics.org/data-science-and-artificial-intelligence/
Levelwise PageRank with Loop-Based Dead End Handling Strategy : SHORT REPORT ...Subhajit Sahu
Abstract — Levelwise PageRank is an alternative method of PageRank computation which decomposes the input graph into a directed acyclic block-graph of strongly connected components, and processes them in topological order, one level at a time. This enables calculation for ranks in a distributed fashion without per-iteration communication, unlike the standard method where all vertices are processed in each iteration. It however comes with a precondition of the absence of dead ends in the input graph. Here, the native non-distributed performance of Levelwise PageRank was compared against Monolithic PageRank on a CPU as well as a GPU. To ensure a fair comparison, Monolithic PageRank was also performed on a graph where vertices were split by components. Results indicate that Levelwise PageRank is about as fast as Monolithic PageRank on the CPU, but quite a bit slower on the GPU. Slowdown on the GPU is likely caused by a large submission of small workloads, and expected to be non-issue when the computation is performed on massive graphs.
Techniques to optimize the pagerank algorithm usually fall in two categories. One is to try reducing the work per iteration, and the other is to try reducing the number of iterations. These goals are often at odds with one another. Skipping computation on vertices which have already converged has the potential to save iteration time. Skipping in-identical vertices, with the same in-links, helps reduce duplicate computations and thus could help reduce iteration time. Road networks often have chains which can be short-circuited before pagerank computation to improve performance. Final ranks of chain nodes can be easily calculated. This could reduce both the iteration time, and the number of iterations. If a graph has no dangling nodes, pagerank of each strongly connected component can be computed in topological order. This could help reduce the iteration time, no. of iterations, and also enable multi-iteration concurrency in pagerank computation. The combination of all of the above methods is the STICD algorithm. [sticd] For dynamic graphs, unchanged components whose ranks are unaffected can be skipped altogether.
2. visualization matters
In our world plagued with a
volume of data unparalleled
in history, the value of
visualizing data and results
effectively is uncontestable.
Transforming data (both qualitative and
quantitative) into beautiful visualizations
improves the odds that your information will
be consumed & used in a meaningful way.
Don’t let that hard work collecting and
analyzing that data go to waste: make sure
your final product communicates your
message with a punch!
5. Piktochart
Piktochart is a web-based infographic
design tool. While the program cannot
be downloaded, it is available to use
online. The main page contains link to
video tutorial, PDF guide, samples and
frequently asked questions.
When you start a new project on
Piktochart, you can use free or paid
themes and then customize to your
own specifications, including colors,
fonts, and images.
6. free versus professional
Free license Pro account
No fee $39.99 annually (non-profit) or
$290 annually (standard)
Limited themes + create your own All themes available + create your own
Piktochart watermark at bottom of image Option to switch off the watermark
10 free image uploads 200 image uploads
Sizable library of icons and some graphics Free library + many more (over 4,000 graphics)
Low resolution image export High resolution image export
Publish for public viewing (or download) Extensive privacy controls for web publishing
7. using piktochart
• Add layout “blocks” with chart elements such as bar graphs, pie
charts, and line graphs
• Can add scalable icons from large library
• Go to graphics >“icons” in the left-hand menu
• Pick from different categories in the drop-down menu such as
“people” or “sport”
• Click the uploads tab to add your own images
* note: SVG files are scaleable, all others (jpeg, gif) will lose quality
when enlarged
• Click the object and use the bottom toolbar to edit opacity,
positioning and rotation
8. building charts
• To make a new chart, go to the side
menu and click “tools.” Drag and drop
the charts icon to the canvas
• Creates charts by manually inputting data
or uploading a CSV file (comma
separated value file) – this can be created
by saving as .CSV from excel
• Chooses chart types that best suit the
data – click each tab to view each
different type of chart (bar, dot, area,
line, pie, matrix, gradient, gauge, donut,
swatch)
• Go to advanced settings (at the bottom)
to change colors. Click on colors to pick
from the color grid
• Double click on chart to edit data and
chart type
9. download & publish
Your final image can be downloaded as a png
or jpeg, for web or print. With the free
version, the Piktochart logo will appear at
the bottom of the image, but can be edited
out as needed.
You also have the option to publish as HTML
(which places your infographic in the public
library) and also “unpublish” which makes
your infographic private again. Additional
advantages to creating infographics in
Piktochart include easy options for
producing an embed link for websites and
that your image is search-engine friendly
when published.
10. to remember
Using a free tool always has
caveats to consider.
Think about how public your data becomes
when you put it into a free tool. Unless you
click “publish” in Piktochart, your data stays
private—use the “download” option to
capture the image without sharing it publicly
(if that’s a concern).
Also, remember that designing your own
images in Piktochart shouldn’t replace
review by your communications team (to
ensure look and feel are consistent with
your project’s brand identify). Talk to your
KM and comms team!
16. finding the right tool
Don’t just use a tool because it
seems fancy. Find something that
works for you and meets your
visualization needs.
Looking to create a spiffy, multi-page report?
Piktochart might not be the right fit, but maybe try a
Slidedoc approach.
Trying to create a snazzy header for a blog post?
Canva was built to make that magic happy, with
special templates and inspiration for that format.
With so many tools out there it’s easy to get
overwhelmed, but there’s also great opportunity for
improving our visual reports and presentations.
18. Canva
Canva is a web-based design program very
similar to Piktochart, but with a number of
layouts and size templates built for social
media and web. It’s a great tool for building
banners, blog images and posters, and the
Editor looks identical to Piktochart with
many of the same features. It’s gotten rave
reviews from PC World and others.
Canva is currently in Beta (as of June
2014)—contact Amanda Makulec for an
invite if you’re not able to join.
19. SlideDocs
A slidedoc is a reporting format
formalized by Nancy Duarte. On the
website you can download templates and
primers on building great slidedocs,
making them simple to create. Plus, the
Diagrammer tool (next slide) is a delight
for anyone who’s tried to hack together a
graphic in SmartArt in the past!
Slidedoc (n.) a visual
document, developed in
presentation software, that
is intended to be read and
referenced instead of
projected