EAGER: Identifying Graphic Design Principles for Reports and Presentations

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Reports and presentations are frequently used to share information. In business, science, education, law, and government, such documents are ubiquitous. When they are well-designed reports and presentations combine text with charts, tables and diagrams to visually highlight important findings. Good designers carefully choose colors, fonts, layout and composition to clarify and emphasize key ideas. Yet, creating an effective graphic design is challenging; most people who need to produce reports and presentations do not have the relevant training in art and design. Even with the proper training, creating effective designs can be extremely time-consuming. The result is that all too often reports and presentations are poorly designed. The goal of this exploratory research is to develop new tools for improving the graphic design of reports and presentations to highlight the desired information content. The initial work centers on the problem of identifying the principles of effective visual communication and graphic design for generating high-quality reports and diagrams. The challenge is to identify the most significant dimensions of visual design (e.g. spatial layout, fonts, colors, etc.) based on a large corpus of reports and presentations. A combination of crowdsourcing, image analysis and machine learning techniques will be used to determine the visual properties that characterize good graphic designs. The expected result will lead to better understanding of how graphic design contributes to the clarity and usability of a report or presentation. This work will produce an explicit set of principles for creating effective graphic design and web-based materials for teaching these principles to improve design literacy in society at large. The project provides research experience to students and design principles will also be presented to high school and college students. The project Web site (http://vis.berkeley.edu/projects/graphicDesignPrinciples ) is used to disseminate results, including software; a corpus of reports and presentations from web-based sources; papers and technical reports; and educational materials.