Find ways to get inspiration to create better charts.
Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint
Sometimes, don't all charts look the same? And then some pessimist may tell you that all of them look so uninspiring! That does sound a little cruel. But how can you and your charts look more motivated? And what can you do to be more inspired, and in turn create charts that inspire others?
The answers are all around you, there is inspiration everywhere! And in this article, we will try and highlight some ideas that will get you inspired.
To begin with, explore financial statements, even if they are printed or within PDFs - these have great charting examples that can
inspire you. You can find plenty of such financial statements from the downloads section of the websites belonging to banking and
financial companies such as Citibank,
McKinsey, etc.
(see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Download reports online
Having said that, charts printed on financial statements mimic paper rather than slides and can thus afford to contain minute detail something that’s not really in place within charts shown on a slide. Did that sound confusing? Let us share an analogy to understand this better:
Based on this analogy, there's no reason why you cannot get inspired by financial reports, but you will have to dilute and adapt that inspiration to something that works well within the confines of a slide! This also means you must have no more than one chart on the slide, or at the most two. And even then, your charts must be clean.
Want more inspiration? You can find entire
boards on sites such as Pinterest that contain charts of all types (see Figure 5).
Figure 5: Pinterest provides so much inspiration
There's even more inspiration on national television, especially the news and business channels. Look at the charts they show, they are almost never too detailed since they are more akin to slides, just what you need!
Still more inspiration can be found in magazines and newspapers. We often cut out samples of great looking charts and other graphics from newspapers and old magazines. We then paste them all in our chart scrapbooks. More often than not, we either scan or photograph our source content. If the content is within an online magazine or ebook, we use screen capture programs such as Snagit to create more source content. We then use PowerPoint slides to create a digital scrapbook, this sort of scrapbook makes an awesome inspiration bank.
Do you have your own inspiration idea? Do share with us by dropping a comment on this page!
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