Data Slide Design Skill

A data slide has one job: the room, glancing, reaches the same conclusion the presenter did — and most fail by neutrality. The chart arrives titled "Revenue by Quarter," un-annotated, gridlines intact, every series equally weighted: technically accurate, rhetorically mute, and the room reads it six different ways (or not at all). The design discipline: the title is the takeaway ("Enterprise drove all of Q3's recovery"), the chart is stripped to what carries that point (chart-choice picks the form; this skill stages it), the annotation layer points the eye (the highlighted series, the arrow at the inflection, the labeled delta), and the honesty pass keeps persuasion from shading into distortion — because a room that catches one axis trick re-audits every slide you ever show.

What This Skill Produces

• The takeaway title — the slide's headline claim, doing the interpretive work
• The staged chart — one chart, stripped, with the point's series highlighted and the rest dimmed
• The annotation layer — the callout, the delta label, the reference line: the eye-path to the conclusion
• The honesty audit — axes, baselines, and selection checked; the caveat line where the data needs one

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• The data and the point — the chart (or numbers) and the one sentence it must prove; a chart without a committed point routes back to deck-outline-first
• The delivery mode — projected (bigger, barer) vs. reading deck (annotations can carry more) — the slide-density-rules fork applies
• The audience's data fluency — a room of analysts tolerates a scatter; a board wants the annotated line
• The data's soft spots — the caveat, the small n, the definition change mid-series (citation-hygiene: the as-of date and source line are non-optional)