• Define Your Purpose

    Decide if you’re telling a story or enabling deep exploration.

  • Focus on Clarity

    Use whitespace, minimal colors, and subtle design for clean dashboards.

  • Drive Audience Action

    Guide readers toward insights that inspire real decisions and meaningful change.

What You’ll Learn

1. Choose the Right Visualization Style
Decide early if your dashboard is exploratory or explanatory to avoid confusing your audience with mixed goals.

2. Establish Context from the Start
Give viewers enough background so they understand the characters, situation, and stakes before diving into detailed charts.

3. Keep Your Design Minimalist
Use ample whitespace, simple colors, and subtle formatting to ensure your data — not the decorations — captures attention.

4. Emphasize the Problem Before the Solution
Help the audience feel the urgency of the issue before you guide them to potential insights, answers, or actions.

5. Separate Storytelling from Exploration
Build distinct dashboards for storytelling and for data exploration, ensuring clarity of purpose and stronger engagement throughout your design.

Applying for Jobs?

6. Showcase Business Impact in Your Portfolio
Frame your dashboards around business problems and solutions to impress employers looking for data-driven decision makers.

7. Create a Storytelling-Focused Project
Build a project specifically highlighting a clear insight-to-action journey, showcasing your storytelling skills to potential employers.

8. Include Explanatory and Exploratory Examples
Demonstrate versatility by showcasing both explanatory and exploratory dashboards, proving you can design for different business needs.

9. Write a Short Case Study Per Dashboard
Attach a 3–4 sentence write-up explaining the story, problem, and action for each portfolio project you share.

10. Tailor Portfolio for the Role
If applying for an analyst, designer, or consultant role, emphasize storytelling differently based on what that job values most.