A team of data analysts were entering the BHBIA’s annual Best of Business Intelligence (BOBI) Awards with a presentation of insights gathered from the analysis of a COVID-19 data set. The competition brief made it clear that how the data was presented would be as important a part of the panel’s judging criteria as how the information itself had been analysed and interpreted.
The presentation was shortlisted for the award and received a ‘highly commended’ rating by the judging panel.
CLIENT:
BOBI Analyst Team of the Year Entrants
AGENCY:
Research Partnership
ROLE:
Data Visualization, Graphic Design, Infographic, Presentation Design
SOFTWARE:
PowerPoint, Illustrator
This project required equal focus on both the presentation design and data visualization elements. Because the presentation itself needed to be passed back and forth between myself and the analyst team for ongoing updates between content and design, I elected to work on the slide layouts directly within PowerPoint, rather than using InDesign, in order to streamline the process and make things easier for the analysts to be able to continue writing up their storyline of the data whilst design work was ongoing.
Use the sliders to view the original vs. redesigned slides
The overall design scheme was developed to elevate the data and insights as much as possible. The shades of blue and green were selected due to their association with the healthcare industry overall, and the scarlet chosen as a highly contrasting shade for use to highlight areas of particular note.
Rather than a stark black and white for text, I opted to use a dark grey and very pale cream instead, which lent more warmth to the layouts and better fit within the rest of the colour scheme.
For the typography, it was important to make font selections that were available on the majority of computers due to the number of different contributors that the document would be passed around between throughout the process. Calibri was selected for the majority of the copy due to how easy it is to read, and Cambria incorporated as the header font for contrast against the sans-serif body text, with the serifs lending a formal tone to the design that felt in keeping with the especially scientific nature of the content.
The data visualizations and infographics were designed using Illustrator. Some were created by using reference screenshots supplied by the team from their Power BI analytics dashboards. Other pieces of information were supplied as text-based statistics which I then worked up into visual depictions from scratch.
