Dashboard

Dashboarders in general are not experts in professional graphic art tools such as Adobe Illustrator. They do know that the graphic artists on a dashboarding team seem to work wonders, however. So let’s lift a little of the magic away today and look at how dashboard pie charts are created using illustration tools.

What’s the big difference between business dashboards created in older versions of Microsoft Excel and the latest Excel 2007? Yes, there are feature upgrades and such, but the main difference is that of look and feel. The graphics have a fresh modern look with depth and polish. Can the underlying graphic work make such a difference. Yes!

Over on the Dashboard Spy main site, I posted a link to a great Adobe Illustrator post that explains how to create dashboard pie charts. Take a look at this dashboard post.

Here is a screenshot from the tutorial:

As you see, Illustrator has a facility for you to enter in values for a pie chart and it generates the pie chart for you. That’s the type of functionality that graphic artists need for dashboarding projects.

Now, here’s a look at how the pie chart is styled. Adobe Illustrator excels at adding effects to objects.

Head over to The Dashboard Spy main site for the link to the Illustrator pie chart tutorial.

Tags: Dashboard Design, Illustrator Pie Chart Construction, Dashboard Tutorial

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Last Modified: Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 @ 11:16

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 11:13 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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