Learning objectives
You can:
- Apply the one-message test to any chart by stating its message aloud in a single clause, identify the second message that has been smuggled in, and split the exhibit rather than annotate around the problem.
- Write an action title that carries a subject, a verb and a checkable number, at a stated precision you can defend, within the two-line ceiling a slide imposes.
- Diagnose a label title by its four types (filing label, dimension label, topic label, question label), state what each one costs the reader, and name the two places a label title is correct.
- Write the title before the chart and derive the chart form from the message type, then show what changes in the exhibit when the title changes.
- Run the three overstatement tests on a headline claim: recompute the number, check the claim's scope against the data's scope, and check the claim's strength, including the sign-change trap where a ratio has no meaning.
- Build a single focal point into an exhibit, count the elements competing for attention before and after, and state the rule that decides which one survives.
- Convert a crowded multi-series chart into small multiples, choose the panel order and grid shape, and defend the shared scale by computing what free scaling would exaggerate.
- Use sparklines and in-line data in a table or a sentence, including the shared-scale rule for a sparkline column, and identify the ranking a level-only column hides.
- Design a dashboard rather than a wall: fix the reading order, put the claim in the top-left tile, compute the reader's comparison load at a given tile count, and defend the tile budget.
- Sequence a set of exhibits so each one advances an argument, decide what earns a page against what earns an appendix slot, and score the result against the seven-rule floor at the crown threshold of 0.90.
Prerequisites & connections
Builds on. PR2.02 directly, and its work is assumed rather than repeated: data ink, the eight things to delete first, pre-attentive attributes, the one-accent colour formula, direct labelling against legends, and the accessibility check in both themes. PR2.01 owns the form choice, so the grammar that says a comparison across categories goes to a sorted bar and a change over ordered time goes to a line is treated here as settled vocabulary. From the mechanics branch, PR1.02 supplies the grid and the type scale that a well-laid-out exhibit sits on. If you have not done the declutter work, do it first: an exhibit with a single clear message drowning in gridlines fails the crown gate on a rule this module does not teach.
Feeds forward. PR3.02 turns exhibits into sketches inside a ghost deck, and the action titles written here are the "dots" that storyboard uses. PR4.02 takes the single chart's title and makes it one line of a whole deck's horizontal logic, where the test is that the titles read alone tell the story with no gaps. PR4.03 puts the sequence inside a narrative arc and asks which single chart the audience will remember. The three archetype modules, PR5.01 to PR5.03, apply exhibit sequencing inside a consulting deck, a board pack and a research deck respectively, each with its own conventions about what an appendix must contain. PR7.01 is where all of it is done once, solo, under time pressure, on data nobody has seen.
Five neighbours own material that touches this one, and the boundaries are deliberate. PR2.01 owns chart-form choice in full, including the seven message types and the permanent fails; where a form is named below it is named and used, never re-derived. PR2.02 owns colour, decluttering and the accent formula; the focal-point section here is about which element gets the accent, not about what accents are. PR4.02 owns titles as a sequence across a deck, the read-only-the-titles test and the horizontal-vertical logic pair; what is owned here is the title of one exhibit and whether its own body proves it. PR0.01 owns the audience profile, the medium choice and the one-sentence takeaway for a whole communication, which is the parent of an exhibit's message rather than the same thing. M10.03 owns exhibits inside written research, where a caption and a source line do work a slide title does differently. Where a section below names one of those ideas, it names it and moves on.