Project snapshot.
Power BI Kit established a consistent, on-brand framework for designing dashboards and reports across Hoare Lea’s building intelligence consultancy practice. It introduced a shared visual grammar for layout, spacing, hierarchy, colour, and interaction, enabling analysts and engineers to produce clear, decision-ready dashboards without reinventing the fundamentals.
The longer-term vision was for the Kit to consume the firm’s evolving design system tokens, allowing Power BI to sit alongside web platforms, internal tools, and micro frontends as part of a unified design system ecosystem.
The challenge.
Inconsistent report design
With Power BI usage expanding across teams, dashboards varied significantly in layout, hierarchy, colour use, and navigation. Authors made design decisions in isolation, leading to inconsistent user experiences.
Power BI defaults created friction
Power BI’s native layout tools offered limited structure. Users and authors were burdened with unnecessary micro decisions around spacing, alignment, labels, and colour usage.
No shared visual language
The firm’s growing cohort of data scientists, many enrolled through the Multiverse data academy, began producing more analytical content than ever. While skills were increasing, the absence of a shared visual system meant their outputs still varied significantly.
Although the organisation had strong brand foundations, there was no equivalent system for analytical expression. Teams lacked a common approach to structuring or communicating insights.
My approach.
I approached dashboard design as a system rather than a collection of templates, defining clear rules for layout, hierarchy, colour, and interaction. This created a shared visual language for analytical reporting, allowing dashboards to be composed consistently while remaining flexible to different data and consulting contexts. I worked with Hoare Lea’s Creative Studio to produce it, as part of a broader vision to unite the organisation’s design system across platforms.
What we built.
1. A branded Power BI theme
A JSON theme file established the firm’s colour palette, typography, and component styling. It provided instant visual consistency and reduced manual formatting.
2. A grid-driven Power BI template
The template included column grids, spacing rhythm, and example layouts using best-practice hierarchy patterns. This addressed Power BI’s structural limitations and accelerated report creation.
3. Navigation and interaction patterns
Rules for global headers, restricted floating navigation, and sensible slicer usage ensured clean, predictable interaction across reports.
4. Visual hierarchy rules
Defined patterns for KPI bands, supporting visuals, and detailed tables, enabling a consistent narrative flow from summary to detail.
5. Guidance for client-facing storytelling
Principles for clarity, whitespace, pacing, and reducing cognitive load helped authors create dashboards that communicated insight rather than decoration.
6. Future compatibility with design system tokens
A foundational goal was interoperability with the organisation’s design system. As design tokens evolved (colour, type, spacing, elevation, motion), Power BI Kit was positioned to consume them, enabling dashboards to automatically align with enterprise UI patterns.
The design system model.
The Kit established a layered approach to analytical design:
Foundation
- Colour tokens
- Typography tokens
- Data colour semantics
- Defaults for charts and components
Structure
- Column grid
- Spacing rhythm
- Navigation patterns
- Preconfigured components
Logic
- Hierarchy rules
- Naming conventions
- Slicer strategy
- Use of colour and emphasis
Experience
- Clear insights
- Faster creation
- Brand consistency
- Reduced cognitive load
Impact.
A consistent analytical language
Teams gained a predictable visual system that improved comprehension and user onboarding. It also supported the firm’s growing emphasis on evidence-led design and consultancy, enabling teams to present analytical thinking and design rationale through clearer, more persuasive dashboards.
Faster delivery and reduced cognitive load
Analysts stopped reinventing layouts and colours. The system handled the design fundamentals so users could focus on insight.
Higher quality client-facing reporting
Dashboards now reflected the same visual control and professionalism as other digital products.
Foundation for token-driven design evolution
By aligning Power BI with design tokens, the Kit established a long-term bridge between analytics, product UI, and cross-platform design systems.
Scalable and maintainable
With a theme file, template and guidance acting as a living system, future improvements could be rolled out across all dashboards.
Why it matters.
Power BI Kit went beyond tidying up visuals. It introduced system thinking to analytical reporting, giving the organisation a shared grammar for insight communication. It positioned dashboards as part of a wider design ecosystem and laid the groundwork for Power BI to become a fully token-driven, design-system-aligned experience.
