The Benefits of Making It Look Pretty

When I led business teams, I’d often get on the analysts about the design of their PowerPoint charts. 

Some of this was a personal thing. When I get bored and have a few hours to spare, I can easily get lost messing around in design software, usually thinking about interesting ways to visualize data. It also drives me absolutely nuts— “can’t concentrate on the material” nuts—when there are too many fonts, too many colors, or objects are misaligned. 

But the bigger part of my focus on design was rooted in a simple fact: people respond more positively to things that are attractive. 

Of course, anyone who’s lived in society for more than 5 minutes knows that’s true. A Porsche wouldn’t be a Porsche with a good engine alone. It’s a Porsche because it just looks better than almost everything else. 

Marcus Samuelsson makes this connection about food in his memoir Yes, Chef. He described the advice of an old boss: “‘Food is not just about flavor,’ [the boss would] lecture us. ‘It has countless dimensions, and one is visual. What do you want it to look like? What do you want the customer to see? Your job is to serve all the senses, not just the f---ing tastebuds, OK?’” 

In the book Storytelling with Data, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic makes the connection between design quality and the kinds of materials many of us consume at work. She writes, “When it comes to communicating with data, is it really necessary to ‘make it pretty?’ The answer is a resounding Yes. People perceive more aesthetic designs as easier to use than less aesthetic designs—whether they actually are or not.” 

The book W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America contains great examples of making data pretty. Du Bois, an eminent sociologist, author, and co-founder of the NAACP, created an exhibit for the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris about the experience of African Americans in the U.S. South. 

I came across it because several data visualization books I’ve read refer to the exhibit as a masterpiece of high design. The book contains charts like the one below:

That could just be a line chart, but the design captures the eye and makes you really study it to understand.  

The chart below has that same dynamic. It could be a stacked bar chart or a side-by-side pie chart, but this rendering is artistically interesting, drawing the reader into the comparisons more readily. 

Many of the charts in Du Bois’s exhibit were wildly ambitious from a design perspective. A chapter from W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America describes why Du Bois and his collaborators took this approach. Sociologist Aldon Morris writes:

“Du Bois was aware that while unmoving prose and dry presentations of charts and graphs might catch attention from specialists, this approach would not garner notice beyond narrow circles of academics. Such social science was useless to the liberation of oppressed peoples.”

Put another way, the point of the data was not to give people information. It was to move people from pre-existing beliefs—in this case, about the inferiority of African-Americans—and make them more open to a different narrative. 

Morris concludes: “Du Bois was acutely aware that the packaging of the exhibit was as important as the data depicted. He understood what Duke Ellington expressed thirty years later: It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.”

At a very basic level, this is a lesson on being audience-focused when communicating. What I most often see is leaders doing the opposite: focusing on what they want to say, not what they want others to hear. 

Making the shift is often where leaders find that improving the design and clarity of their communications is impactful. 

Most often, the task isn’t to create the kinds of ambitious designs that Du Bois’s team went for. Instead, it’s to ask very basic questions like:

• What is my main point?

• What kinds of emotional reactions do I want to generate? How do I want people to feel?

• What’s going to add or distract from those objectives?

Reflecting on these questions usually yields insights. The difficult part is slowing down and making time for it. It’s hard to create effective communication when we don’t give ourselves space to do so!