Insights on Dashboard Design

Few of the style guides we have examined say much about dashboards, but the Baltimore City Data Fellows guide includes a specific section on dashboard design.

This section doesn’t go into a tremendous amount of detail. They include some high-level recommendations on designing to a grid, implementing good visual hierarchy, and recognizing reading patterns. They also note how they build a more in-depth dashboard design document; of course, this guide was published in April 2022, so perhaps they will update it in the future.

I especially love their acknowledgement that “Western reading patterns” go from top left to bottom right–not all cultures read in that way or design in grids.

Full Data Visualization Style Guidelines: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/d19f7d4d2a9b49c7b8f68730e3cda1e6

---

Written by Jon Schwabish