Saul Bass was a master of distilling the big story down into a few key pieces, especially in a world where most movie poster designs took the “potpurri approach” of trying to include something for everyone.
Beyond the obvious connections this has to branding, I immediately thought of analytics and data visualization benefiting from Bass’ “symbolize and summarize” approach.
We’ve got endless data we can use to tell a story visually, and the business intelligence and data viz tools to do so quickly and efficiently. But too often our dashboards end up turning into endless scrolls of pretty charts and tables, all which try to tell a story, but none which tell it very well.
The trick in analytics and any sort of reporting is to pick the metrics and charts that really matter, and leave out the rest (or at least, leave them for the appendix). Anyone can build 100 charts telling 100 stories. But it takes thought and conviction to pick the 1 chart that tells the story best. The one that makes the other 99 of secondary importance.
Just because you can measure it doesn’t mean you should. Instead, focus your time on figuring out the K in KPI.