Let’s make the top two of ways people love to organize information. First, for sure, is throwing all data in trash can and forgetting about it. The second is tables. People love tables! They love tables so much that Apple was nothing without spreadsheets software. Apple hired Bill Gates and his Microsoft to make that soft and he was happy to get inspired by Mac OS.

Anyway, let’s get back to the tables. I know a lot of office workers who even write texts in Excel — they find that way of information organization quite comfortable. So once again people love tables. It’s a pity that love doesn’t mean “can do good”. I met too much tables in my life but fell in love with only two of them. Other tables look like informational prison where data has to sit in it’s personal cell jailed.

Why so serious introduction?

When we started making Invest Gazeta design the one who was in charge told that the main goal is to make site feel like you’re reading magazine but not making it look like magazine. We had to use different infographics elements in articles to make them look more magazine-like. Besides histograms, graphs and that awful pie charts I had to decorate tables and make them look joli. We discussed several ways and stopped on the most simple yet elegant way. That’s how I met sparklines.

What’s sparklines?

To get the most exact definition head to Wikipedia (I read it writing the post for the first time). My definition is sparklines — little charts right in table or in-line text that expand information presented by data but they are not as informative, as detailed charts. E.g. if we decided to show unicorn meat price then we can put graph next to the numbers to show that it raised during last couple of month:

How can I make usable sparklines?

To make sparklines usable and useful first decide if you need any and what data you want to decorate. Then decide what type of graph you want to use. Examples are shown in illustrations below. But first I want to discuss visualization of graphs as sparklines. A lot of useful advises are given by Edward Tufte (he is the author of the term sparkline) in his Sparklines: theory and practice. I like this article because I read it when I was finishing making sparklines for Invest Gazeta and found out that almost all solutions I came up with equal to Edward’s.

There are two columns with sparklines in this table: Last known temperature and How likely air smells. I used progress bar to illustrate how likely air smells because people are used to progress bar and percentage nowadays.

The temperature dynamics and adorable temperature range are shown in temperature column. Thanks to sparklines we not just present the last temperature but also show how it changed and how likely the season was for people. Marvelous! Units are show next to data because it’s easier to read not big tables that way.

I want to set your eyes on Term column. Instead of using two columns for first and last month in season I combined them into one thus improving readability of the table.

Sparklines in this table were used to show homeworks missed thanks to each of the games and to show overall result.

Homeworks missed are represented quite good thanks to sparklines. If we compare the shown sparkline with others we can conclude that it’s not intelligence boost but just switching to another games.

Overall results column represent fails and wins so viewer can see the progress. As we can see, player learned nothing — if he was unskilled in one game, he remained unskilled and won from time to time ;)

And once again I minimized the number of columns showing game publisher next to game title.

I had most fun with this table asking friends and trying to remember things you usually forget.

Let’s start with the last column Music volume after 21 average doses. Data is in decibels and each bar represents volume after certain average dose. It’s the same graph as in first example but it’s made more like equalizer bars and divided on 21 parts. If we could make roll over on that, that would give us even more information on volume on every dose.

The amount of bottles friends drank during 2005-2009 is represented in corresponding column. We use red dots to indicate and make more readable start and end of the sparkline and also color code numbers to see if the ending number is bigger, less or the same as starting. To make sparkline look more appealing I added background gradients that I couldn’t use in the first table because background there is used to represent range of temperatures.

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Sparklines are often can be replacement of big and detailed graphs and charts. Sometimes sparklines are even more informative then miserable pie charts. E.g. Google Analytics and Flickr use sparklines to represent visitors statistics and even as sign of statistics (on Flickr).

Sparklines on Flickr (on top) and Google Analytics

Long time ago you have to think of real-sounding story to explain your lies. Today in 21st century you can just make powerpoint presentation. One day it comes to every designer — he has to stare at icon that
looks like hebrew qoph letter jumping in his Dock. When this glorious event happened with me I decided to make professional good looking on every PC or Mac presentation and try not to kill all the people while doing it. The first statements were okay but I wanted to kill all and everyone when I finished making the presentation. So I made a list of advices that can help to save not whole Earth population, but at least it’s half.

Making PowerPoint presentations is fun… yeah… uhm…

1. All objects are better be drawn in Illustrator or other vector graphic editor that exports to PDF and supports RGB colour model. PowerPoint works with PDF, imagine that!
2. Proportions of the presentation must be 4:3, so everyone can see the whole slide on every weird laptop. Size by default (720×540) sound tiny nowadays so I made all bitmap object twice as big as they were supposed to and then changed their sizes in powerpoint.
3. Save as much objects as you can as PDF with fonts embedded. Place all the objects you cand on the slide background. Don’t forget, that powerpoint allows only one background image that would be stretched or tiled, so you better size your backgrounds equal to slide size.
4. PowerPoint understands non-system fonts if you install them on the computer with presentation. Sometimes it’s enough to place fonts in the same folder with presentation, but sometimes is isn’t.

   From now on you can create presentations with any fonts but be sure to check if it looks okay with system fonts. It usually does if texts are aligned with text tools, not with spaces ;)

5. Don’t apply all effects like transparency, reflections, vulgar shadows etc. in powerpoint if it is possible. Applying them in powerpoint doesn’t reduce filesize but fills RAM with trash and makes it work unstable. If powerpoint decides that there is not enough memory to show effect, it would hide not just the effect but also the object effect was applied to. Sometimes it makes computer reboot and trashes the presentation file.
6. Avoid templates, because texts in them act like they want but not like you expect. Create everything with your hands, even bulleted lists. As we all know if information can become unreadable — it will in the most reliable moment.
7. Don’t forget to uncheck Shrink text to fit in Alignment and Spacing panel. That shrinkage acts weird too.
8. The last but not least: save your presentation file after each change and store it on local hard drive. Always save using new name (Save as…). Some versions of powerpoint like PowerPoint 2008 for Mac OS X delete the file during autosave then try to write to it, have problem with permissions and write nothing leaving you with your 0 bytes file. I’m not sure if this problem is common for all version but better be prepared! ;)

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I tried to create presentations using Keynote. It’s easy, comfy and faste, but it doesn’t export to PPT as good as I expected. So there are still situations when you need to use powerpoint.

And the conclusion of working with PowerPoint from Dilbert:

Tell me the first thing that comes on your mind when you hear Google, Apple, Microsoft, Flickr or Twitter. No, it’s not the technological stuff or something. It’s feeling about that tech things you would think in a second. As in one of episodes in Dilbert series, the artist asks for association on caterpillar phobia. It’s grey octagon as to artist, but other think about another colours and shapes. Same here — we think personal thing about these companies and their products. Some are mac nazi (I really like this term), some just hate macs and adore, dunno, Microsoft or Linux. But we strongly have that feeling about companies. We give it a soul and as the soul as striped as Frankenstein, it is demon, that doesn’t know what to do with it.

Okay, some demons do know, like Apple or Microsoft. These are companies that started working and continue working earning money. But what about Google? One of the cool designers and guys from Google left the job, ’cause he couldn’t stay it, as he said. The discussions on 1 pixel border reduction can drive mad anyone. I bet noone of the developers would see the difference looking through between 5 and 7 px wide borders. Because it’s irrelevant for them and, let’s tell the truth, they don’t care. Does it say something about it’s search engine or mail service? Nothing! But some would think twice before using the services (if we had a choice) if they sympathise this guy. Others don’t care and Google guys have to work harder to communicate the positive image, to reduce the number of stripes in their Frankenstein’s body. I’ll add this once again: if we had a choice, ’cause we don’t have many Google competitors. But they will sure come and I’d like to be prepared if I were Google.

We had a client, who told us that there is no sense in starting to build the brand because his market is growing and he gets lots of clients anyway. We asked him, what is his strategy for the moment when market starts growing. He replied that then he would think about building brand. Ah, at least he knew that he needed brand, not just trademark. But he also didn’t realise that he has to have brand earlier the market stops growing, so he could be the authority when others just start thinking about building their brands. It’s also important that building a brand while the market grows is much easier and effective then sticking into the market shared by others. That market our client was talking about stopped to grow in the end of 2008, like most financial markets. Those who started with building their brands are on top now.

So, the more holistic the essence and feeling of the brand in minds of our target audience are, the more is brand loyalty So, the more holistic the essence and feeling of the brand in minds of our target audience are, the more is brand loyalty and the faster you build the brand, the more profit you get.