Power BI and Design

I’m running into a tension between a one-page design versus a design with white space. White space is supposed to ease the eye flow around visuals and tables but it does create space. I get the idea of one pagers and usually strive for that, but if the lettering is too small, maybe it would be better to have white space and allow two pages or reduce the number of tables and charts.

Here’s a sample design where I originally started with one page (the blur is by design – I’m not showing details of our business):

I found the type to be rather small, especially after printing it out as a PDF, so I decided to go the design route with white space to drive the flow of the eye around information.

I guess the white space was too much. Granted, the layout probably was too different. They wanted the tables and charts to fill up the page.

Oh well, it didn’t hurt to try.

I do get the idea of one page because the end result of the designed PDF with white space would be 20 pages whereas crowding into one page would lead to 10 pages. Ten is better than 20, if you can bear the small letters.

It’s a tough call.

The aforementioned visuals were for the Marketing department and the design/layout hasn’t really changed from what has been done before. For the next report, I’m trying to break the bounds of what has been done before, so this one is taking a lot of thinking and experimentation. However, what I’m striving for may be too much for them – it may be too different – so I’m taking a risk developing something they may not “like”.

But we do need to move from this:

So, I’m sitting back, pretending to be a manager running this department, dreaming up what I need to do my management job. One thing we’ve been lacking is context and trends, so I thought I would show a series of results over time. And maybe even include comparisons against competitors, like so:

I have other ideas for graphics but they do stretch what we’ve done before. Like I said before, it may be too different for acceptance. And those ideas may not actually help them manage their business.