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Make the Logo Bigger Please

During the graphic design phase of your enterprise dashboard, who has final say over the look and feel? That’s a tough question. It’s always a big issue - whether you use an off-the-shelf dashboard software solution or custom-build the dashboard yourself. Granted, you have less design decisions to make if you use a vendor’s product, but with the increasing ability to “skin” the interface, you still have weighty graphic design considerations to make.

Politically, is it a best practice to have the design team gently “guide” the graphic design considerations given user/sponsor input? Or do you give the project sponsor or executive user full rein to select his favorite colors and force upon others his desire for big blinking arrows? It’s hard to say. In a perfect world, an enterprise dashboard project should be designed with graphic design/usability/information architecture rules that are universally accepted and provided by a professional versed in the very latest trends. BUT, in the real world, it is hard not to be swayed by what Mr. Big Shot insists upon.

After viewing about 1000 business intelligence dashboards on the pages located here and at dashboardspy.com, I think you’ll agree with me that dashboard design on the whole still has some way to go in catching up to the design standards we now see in other business applications.

I came across a wonderful tool to help you out the next time you get into a discussion about a graphic design detail on your dashboarding project. I found it at the graphic designer resource site, http://www.underconsideration.com. Let’s say the sponsor needs you to make the logo bigger. That’s when you whip out your trusty usb jump drive and play the following song. Give a listen I think you’ll find it a blast. I did!

http://www.underconsideration.com/MaketheLogoBigger.mp3

Tags: Enterprise Dashboard Design, Make the Logo Bigger, song, mp3

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Last Modified: Friday, June 8th, 2007 @ 10:25

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 10:11 am and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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