Crafting Visually Engaging data

Hi. This is Mitra from Kount. Using Kount, we have such creative freedom over how we visualize and layout our data, but we all want to move quickly from the point that we finished our analysis, to the point where we have impactful visualizations ready to share. So in this video, I'm going to show you some of the features and best practice that you can make use of in count to help style your data outputs well and do it efficiently. Here I'm going to demonstrate how we can use templates to very quickly turn analysis into a polished output with very little effort. So you here I have a single chart that I would like to share. And one way I could do that is if I look in my data panel at the add template icon, I can navigate to this template, which is just a branded single insight template, and it will add it to my canvas. From here, I can just drag and drop my chart on it. And we can already see that just in a few clicks, this looks far more presentable. I can add title. I can add description down here. And then perhaps I want to share this with someone in the organization that's asked for it. And maybe I just go into report view and share this link. And this is a really easy way to standardize output for people to be able to put their analysis into templates without having to really think about the design. It's important to know as well that templates can be far more complex than this. If you were to look at some of the examples that we provide in the built in templates and count, You will see, for example, larger layouts. You could build up dashboards or metric tree layouts. You can add your own branding, your own colors, and then you can share them with the workspace so that everyone can access them. So next, I'm going to have a look at shared color styles. So let's start by defining a color style. Within the design panel with nothing selected on my canvas, you will see it says styles and there is a plus sign to add one. And there's three different types of styles that you can add. So I'm gonna start with a single color. Let's choose what we would like, and we just give it a meaningful name. So now when I select my chart, I can come to color as usual. And instead of choosing from here, which you might be used to doing, just clicking on shared will show you the shared styles, and I can click on purple. I can then reuse this color for any elements that I think require it. I could duplicate this chart. And the beauty of these are that if at a later stage you decide to change them, you can simply come to this definition and make a change here and decide what you would prefer. So we'll just rename this pink. Let's look at some of the other color types that you can add. This chart is using a continuous palette. I can select to add a continuous palette. And, again, I will add color of my choice and give it a meaningful title and I'll go through the same process. So this color will be available wherever you are specifying the color. So here it will be under the display and you can see now we have local palettes green. You'll notice that it isn't offering me the pink and that's because it's pink is a single color and this visualization is taking a continuous color palette. So we just see the one that we have defined, which is green. For our enterprise customers, you can also benefit from sharing these styles at a workspace level. After defining your color palettes here in the canvas, you can come over to the count logo under file and publish styles to workspace. So if you set up your brand colors, for example, publish that to the workspace, everyone will be able to make use of them. To show you how that looks in action, we have a categorical palette here. I'm going to click on color. I'm gonna click on display and then look at my palette options, and you'll see that we have some workspace palettes that have been shared. So I haven't defined these in the canvas, but they have been shared at workspace level, and they are available here. A tip for those who are not on enterprise plans is that you can store your brand colors as a template, which can be very helpful. If I come back to the templates menu and use this template, you will see that these are just shapes with our brand colors in. And now if I come back to my styles, I can use the color picker just to go in and choose these colors. And now I'm using the proper brand colors, and that's reflected in all the items that I have linked to my shared styles. Another useful feature is that we can copy and paste styles. So this is useful if you've perhaps already created some charts that were made up of different styles, but you've decided this is the one that you would like to use. You can right click, copy as, and copy styles. And then you can come to your other charts. I'm gonna hold down shift just so that I can select more than one. And again, right click, copy as, paste styles. This will copy all the formatting from your chart, not just the color, but the fonts, font size, etcetera, and it can be a really quick way of making sure there's consistency between your charts. And the good thing here is that these are now all linked to our shared styles, so I can go ahead and change these and they will all change on the canvas. So now I'm going to demonstrate how we can use shapes to help frame and organize data on your canvas. Here I have two charts and I'd like to explore some visual approaches for displaying these in a metric tree or a dashboard. We have shapes in this menu from the toolbar at the bottom and I'm going to use the rectangle. For this one, I can draw a rectangle over it. Maybe I will give it a color. I'll go for something quite muted. Obviously, I can't see my chart, which isn't ideal, but that's okay. We can right click on our rectangle and we can choose to send this to the back. So this can be a really nice way to frame elements, but there's other things we can do to improve this. I think the white background here is quite prominent and is first thing that my eye is drawn to. So I'm going to take that off. So to do that, I highlight my chart, and I come down to the bottom of the design panel where I have these style options. For this one, I'm going to click on the paintbrush icon icon. And for the whole sheet, it's currently a solid white, and I'm just gonna change that to none. Here, you can see it's much more seamless now, and it's sitting on top of that meter's color. The other things that you can change down here are your grid lines. You have full control over which grid lines show and what color and thickness they are, and you can also change your text formatting. A good thing to know here is default will change all of the text on your chart, or you can have more granular control going into each of these individual ones. For example, perhaps this isn't the font we like to use. We can change the default font, and you can see all of these elements have changed. It might be that you just want to change some so that they stand out more. So let's change our axis titles, and now you can see that these are blue. Importantly, just note that titles have their own title style, and they are at the top of the design panel here, and we can make changes as we wish to the title. Okay. So let's look at a different treatment for this chart. I'm going to use a rectangle again. This time, I will keep this white and perhaps we'll give it an outline this time. So I'm just gonna give it a weighted outline. I can give it some rounded corners. And as we know, we just need to send that to the back so that we can see our chart. We could also give a bit of depth to this. So one thing we often do is if I just copy and paste this background, and I'm just gonna fill it with the color of our outline, and I'm just gonna send that to the back. It's just a nice way to add a bit of interest. One thing to know is that if you do create cards like this, it can be useful to group items together. So, for example, if I were to move my chart out of the way and I highlight these two elements, I can right click and group this selection. So this will mean that these don't come apart when I move them around. I can duplicate them by holding option down and create more. I can put my chart on, and it means that I can make edits without these two coming apart. I can also lock them. So if I right click and lock this, then it means that I cannot accidentally move this anywhere. So that can be really useful if you know that you want these shapes to stay in place and you just want to concentrate on editing what's within them. Just know that if you do want to edit them, you would unlock them. You can either unlock all objects or just the one that you're after, and you would ungroup them to be able to make edits. So next, I'm going to show you some techniques to help align objects in your canvas. When you're putting a collection of visual elements together in the canvas, we often want them to align nicely. We do this because it looks more professional but also reduces visual clutter, so it's important. What we don't need to do is spend a lot of time trying to align objects very carefully in a very zoomed up view in the hope that they are vaguely aligned. We have tools that will help us with this. The first one is in your account logo menu under Preferences, we have these options, Snap to Grid and Snap to Objects. I'm just gonna turn on Snap to Objects. What this means is that as I start creating these objects, you'll see these yellow Smart Guides are pulling my object into place and aligning. I can do another one and you'll see it not only aligns top and bottom but it also is creating an equal space between the three. I can continue to do this, and maybe I duplicate these and keep using these smart guides, and I very quickly have a perfect grid. The other way that we can do this is if we have a selection of objects, I can select all of them, and you'll see in the right hand panel, these are our our align and distribute icons. I can use these in much the same way. So I'm going to choose for their vertical centers to be aligned, and they will snap into place. And then I will ask for the horizontal spacing to be distributed evenly. And there we have perfectly distributed and aligned elements. We can also use these tools when we're working with more complex groups of objects. First of all, I'm going to highlight these and I'm going to group the selection. I'll do the same here but using the shortcut. Now I can drag these and I can see my smart guides that are helping me decide where to put them. Or alternatively, I can highlight all of them. And again, I can use the icons in the right hand panel. Next, I'm gonna demonstrate how we can use the scale tool to help us align the scale of different elements on your canvas. Because we are working on an infinite canvas, we can create visuals really at any scale. And that means that sometimes if we share elements between canvases, they're not at exactly the right scale to be able to work together. So in this example, I have some data presented and I brought in a couple more charts to add, but as you can see, they're far too big. And a really easy way to be able to scale elements is to come down and change from the cursor to this scale tool. I highlight the elements I want to scale, and then I can just drag in and out to whichever scale I would like. I can position this next to my other elements, make it small enough. Another way you can do this is by frame, which can be really handy. So we have everything contained in this frame. My scale cursor is selected, and I can just drag this in and out, and it's gonna make everything bigger or smaller. Just remember to come back to this cursor when you've finished. I hope that was a useful overview of how you can efficiently create visually engaging data outputs. Thank you.