Here’s a sample dashboard, lifted from the school’s website

This particular accountability measure freaks me out, also, because it demands focused graphic design, which my longtime subscribers will recall is an incessant fixation of mine.

Unfortunately, Greg and his team have here what designers call a “low signal-to-noise ratio.” The information he’s trying to convey pulses faintly from the screen (low signal) while other design elements blare static around it (high noise).

In trying to determine a piece’s signal (and this applies to your conference slide deck, classroom PowerPoint slides, handouts, writing, public speaking, anything) ask yourself what is essential to the point and then separate the rest. (Or, as Queen Gertrude advised Polonius, “More matter, with less art.”)

In this case, the life blood of Greg’s design, the thing without which the dashboard would be nothing, is very small.

These tiny arrows constitute a faint signal. They force the viewer to work harder to determine meaning. A faint signal isn’t fatal, by any means, but a little obscurity compounds quickly over time.

The noisier elements of Greg’s design, I imagine, are obvious to both he and I. This is a fiendishly complicated project for a lot of reasons (listed below) and the solutions (listed even farther below) are not obvious.

1. He’s dealing with totally different scales. Attendance is a continuous percentage. Discipline is measured by discrete incidents.
2. Inconsistent indicators. High attendance is good but high discipline is bad. The same indicator for each carries with it opposing significance. Greg has attempted a workaround by reversing the attendance scale, which wasn’t a bad move.
3. Each colored section (green, yellow, and red) measures a different range. The green zone for referrals is 3 units long; for non-completers and safety it’s 2 units long. This is almost certainly due to the fact that Greg and his team think that three referrals is less a cause for concern (threat level green) than three non-completers (threat level yellow). That ethical differentiation is pretty cool, though it’s also throwing up some unwanted noise.

So as we attempt a (totally unauthorized redesign) of Greg’s dashboards we try to amplify what matters and dampen what doesn’t. If this were a contract job, I’d be in constant contact with Greg and his team, asking them what they thought mattered. As is, this is totally presumptuous.

Here’s my draft:

Specific revisions:

1. “Attendance” from the original had to become “absence.” Imagine two side-by-side pie charts comparing two candidates in an election. Imagine that one pie chart showed how many people did vote for Candidate 1 and the other chart showed how many people did not vote for Candidate 2 and you have an idea of how confusing this can get over the long haul. So everything is now defined as a negative. Low bars are good and high bars are bad all the way across the board.
2. There is an exact count for each measurement to counterbalance the noisy scaling from the original. Each absence bar measures two percent (2%) and each of the other scales measures one (1) referral / withdrawn student / safety incident. It doesn’t really matter if the viewer knows that or not, however.

   The strength of the colorful scale in both the original and the revision is its visual signal. (Red is bad!) However, Greg asked his visual signal to carry information on its back, whereas I pushed it off to the side letting them both do their separate jobs.

3. Gradients. In a few years gradients are gonna fall out of design favor, at which point I’ll look back on this time of my life with a small cringe. For now, gradients modernize the original ever so slightly.
4. A design that reflects the school’s brand. I’m probably the only Californian who knows that Greg’s district’s web server was down this last weekend. Once it came up, I pulled a color swatch from its website. Depending on who sees the dashboard, it’s a nice opportunity to enhance the Shannon Learning Center brand.

If I were Greg, I’d be wondering right now if this update is as easy to update as his original, where he just moves arrows side-to-side on the scale. A: Not quite, but close.

You start from a fully loaded original and delete the bars you don’t need.

If you want to animate the thing for extra credit, you create five slides. (Greg’s original looks like a PowerPoint file; mine’s out of Keynote.) The first has empty indicators; the second has an accurate first indicator; the third has an accurate second indicator, and so on.

Then you set the transition between each slide to a two-second left-to-right “wipe” and the result is something like a rising power meter. Keynote will export to QuickTime so you can play it on your school’s closed circuit tv network, if you’ve got one of those.

Easy, good-looking, high signal-to-noise ratio, here are the resources:

1. Keynote [pretty!]
2. PowerPoint [sigh!]
3. QuickTime [the full effect!][qt:http://www.mrmeyer.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/shannonredux.mov 400 316]

Final remarks:

1. Thanks in advance, Greg, for being a good sport on this one. You’ve got a great thing running there.
2. If you’re an administrator (or know one) who’d like to put Greg’s program into effect at your school (or district) I’d like to provide the design work for $free. Pass it on: dan at mrmeyer dot com.

1. Introduction
   

Introduction

Your first slide is crucial. Cru. cial.

Your first slide establishes your presentation’s identity and even if you only fire up a projector three times a semester or present at only one conference, your presentation needs an identity. If you plan on presenting your lessons every day for a year (as has been my m.o.) this is quintuply important.

The reason is simply this: you don’t want your audience distracted by what your presentation looks like at the expense of what it’s about. No matter what my slides are about, they share a similar look.

This is priceless. In a matter of days, my students forget that the body text (Tahoma) looks different from problem information text (Gill Sans). They could tell you that the slide backgrounds are light blue but they forget that I use a gradient. I set problem answers to a darker shade of the background blue, but after a week, the look of the slide becomes so transparent, half the class would tell you it’s black. They never noticed the line breaks (always 10 points) or the reliable indentation (headers always 12% off the side; body text 3% more) or a dozen other elements I painstakingly built into the template with the express intention of rendering them totally, and completely, invisible.

All that work on the front-end has no immediate benefit. In fact, it makes things harder. Once your look becomes transparent, you’ve got a problem, because, see, then your presentation had better be about something. After your style fully recedes into the projector screen, you’d better have substance in spades. By example, it is much harder to create engaging content than it is to throw a sound effect or a spinning transition into your slide design. It’s also a helluva more satisfying for the designer and the audience.

A visual description of the difference:

The term here is signal-to-noise ratio. These slide decks had the exact same signal, but which was noisier?Some of the best advertising nowadays builds as much staticky noise into an ad as it can stand. (It should go without saying that education and advertising are rather different animals.)

And I was pretty fair to the noisier slides. I only kept the background gradient shifting but if I did justice to the majority of classroom PowerPoint lessons I would’ve had the text shifting font, color, and position. I would’ve switched between one- and two-column layouts at will. I would’ve inserted clip art. I would’ve used a wacky twirl to usher in new bullet points and move between slides.

I realize that those PowerPoint gewgaws seem cute and that the students seem to enjoy them. They are and they do. But cute wears off within a month and then any effort you put into the look of your slides is effort siphoned away from what your slides are about.This tutorial isn’t about that. We’re basically making this Very Special Edition of dy/dan up as we go along but perhaps we’ll address content later.

All this is to say that as you develop your template keep a close eye on consistency.

Your Template

1. Choose a background. Gradients are hot right now. Light ones. Dark ones.
   

   With my next presentation I want to play around with some of Squidfingers’ patterns.

   

   Just don’t let your background call attention to itself, a là 90% of PowerPoint’s prepackaged offerings. For this reason, and for some contrast issues, photo backgrounds are a no-no. (Unless you’re willing to play hardball with the negative space, which is a different tutorial.)

2. Choose your fonts. Run back to your blog first and perform a quick font count. Two? Three of them tops, right? They’re onto something. Do not get all fontacular here. Choose sans serif. Those tiny Curlz don’t show up well in screen pixels. Choose contrast. Choose 18 points or higher.If you ever have to drop below 18 points, odds are good that your point could be more concisely written or that you should speak more, forcing your audience to read less. Do not choose Comic Sans. Please do not ask why. Any explanation past “it’s overused by teachers” gets annoyingly technical and kind of arbitrary.
   
3. Choose your colors. Dark colors for a light background. Light for dark. Mid-range colors are tough on the eyes but a lot of designers are throwing 5% gray on a black background rather than pure white. Choose a second color for special occasions. A slightly more saturated (purer) version of your background color.
4. Choose your transitions. Or better yet, don’t. Mosaics, spinning cubes, etc., artifically inflate visual interest, which is a bubble that’s bound to burst. (see previous post on wipes)
5. Choose your sound effects. See “Choose your transitions.”

At some point halfway through these guidelines, you may lose the point, chalk this up as too picky, and move along. So if the purpose of sturdy, unfussy design has become wobbly and fussy, then once again:

Good design decreases conceptual resistance in the same way that clear speech is preferable to slurry, drunken rambling and, like an earthmover, good design collapses the distance between Knowing and Not Knowing. Good design is good for anyone but it’s particularly good for educators.

Fair enough.

But full disclosure: This has been the longest standing post in my Blog This Someday pile simply because I have absolutely no training as a designer of any sort. That may well be a boon to us here since the same could probably be said of our no-MFA-having teaching audience.

And the preface: If you’re out there giving lectures or presentations with any regularity and you’re only supplementing your talks with transparencies or nothing at all, consider investing in a laptop and a projector. For me it was a large hurdle between good presentation and great presentation, the sort where you spend twenty minutes from the front knowing you’ve got ’em mesmerized. Not for nothing, it has also transformed my teaching.

As with every slice of teaching, improvement is a three-step process:

1. Target Areas For Growth. Do you want to make your presentations more engaging? No time for that? Fine. Perhaps you’d like to select another entrée from the menu.
2. Get Metacognitive. Why did you enjoy that presentation on classroom management? Why exactly did you walk away from that talk on Corn Futures in the Midwest feeling like the PowerPoint muddled the point? Integrate the former into your own presentations and throw the latter out bouncer-style.
3. Seek Out The Best In Those Areas, a task which, with the Internet, has never been easier. There is an RSS feed for every slice, I’m positive. Simply Google this topic to find that blogger who’s just-okay but who links up to another guy who is positively at the top of the game.

   Let me save you the trouble: Cameron Moll, Khoi Vinh, Guy Kawasaki, Garr Reynolds.I’m a piker next to those names (hence the line break) but I’ll also encourage you to tune into my classroom slides. You can buy worse slides than mine.

Our first exercise.

1. Which of the following slides do you prefer? Why does the information slide off one faster than the other?
   Slides lifted from Garr Reynolds.

Answers are welcome in the comments (I’ll post my own commentary shortly) but, truthfully, with this introductory post, the answer isn’t the point. The process is the point. That three-step process has made me everything I am as a designer and a great deal of who I am as a teacher.