I was just looking through diggs related to my last post and stumbled over cazh1: on Business, Information, and Technology: Project Status Dashboards Best Practice (and a PowerPoint trick). He makes a good point about how to communicate the status on a dashboard once you have it - something I forgot to mention, and up to day did not very effectively.

In fact, for a couple of times now I saw my printouts and thought “dang, you cannot see the colors anymore, I hope people will get it.” But as so often, we move on in the hamster wheel. Cazh1 has a point:

Pictures: Many applications have some form of status indicator icons available for reports and displays. The visual analog of an LED indicator on a dashboard doesn’t quite work, however; as Rothman points out, colors can get transformed into shades of grey that are tough to differentiate. And it’s not just the color-blind; a more practical issue is the availability of reasonable quality color for the final display.

Let’s face it - most PowerPoint presentations aren’t presented, they are printed and distributed. And even if your company is rich enough to provide all departments with color copiers, you still run the risk of people copying or scanning or otherwise rendering your beautiful dashboard into a muddy series of gray dots.

Most applications that provide colored icons for status indicators also differentiate by shape - a round ball for Green, a triangle for Yellow, and a diamond or square for Red. A traffic light icon is cute, but if you are an international company, might be confusing. It’s also cumbersome to manipulate icons next to the text in your slides / reports.

My preferred solution is to use the Wingdings family of fonts, laying down shape and color:

˜ “Green” ASC(152) [~ tilde] font-family: ‘Wingdings 2′

p “Yellow” ASC(112) [p] font-family: ‘Wingdings 3′

n “Red” ASC(110) [n] font-family: ‘Wingdings’

If that doesn’t come out on your browser, here’s an image of the final product:

With this method for displaying status, we can communicate the GYR “health” of the project with a reasonably good feeling that the message won’t be lost across multiple display mediums.