No matter how you’re using a graphics program, remember the RDHP—the Rough-Draft Hierarchical Principle. It also may help at times when you word-process memos.
The principle: create the basic pictures or prose yourself. But if pressed for time? Then farm out the details. Just as a secretary might put your memos in the right format on paper, he or she might also smooth your drawings. Or your art department might.
Here are other tips for graphics users:
KNOW YOUR CHARTS AND OTHER BASIC TOOLS
A line chart—a graph with the outlines of hills and valleys—is great when broad trends count more than the numbers themselves.
One glance at a good line chart can tell you if wok sales are up or down.
And for even better effect, you might try a curve chart, or area chart, filling in the area below the curves that the lines make.
“Instead of looking like a wriggly line,” explains Carl Herrman,[[103]] an award-winning graphics expert, “it looks like a mountain. It’s much easier to follow.”
And if you want to show sales trends in three wok categories? Well, you can still use a filled-in chart.
“You might fill in the bottom one solid black,” says Herrman. “You might do a cross-hatch—parallel intersecting lines—on the middle one. And on the top one, you might have a straight-line effect or a lot of lines running close to each other.