Pretty Tables, Happy Excel Sheets

I used to hate Excel sheets…

Till, I became a designer and decided everything I do or make has to be “designed” well. If not more usable then at least a little bit delightful. But then it works both ways, a delightful design is often usable and vice versa. So, when I was cataloguing cartoons for analyzing them for gender characteristics and biases I made the following pretty excel sheet. They are color coded so that the user, in this case ‘Me’, gets the context immediately and the grouping of columns makes immediate sense.

Colorful table where color is used to group similar item content together.

Then I couldn’t help myself but explore some other options, such as the following that follows the color wheel (off the top of my head, if I remember the wheel correctly). Here color is used to bring out the distinctness of the individual column.

Spin-off of the above table where color wheel is used to bring out the distinctness of the individual column.

And then the following where a gradient of color is used to highlight the spatially arranged columns where each column is different and houses a discrete information.

Made with love using Apple’s Number Mac application.