How to Design in Power BI

Creating a report in Power BI is one thing, but designing a report that people can actually understand and use is another challenge entirely. Good design transforms a confusing cluster of charts into a clear, compelling story that guides decisions. This article breaks down the principles and practical steps to design visuals in Power BI that are not only beautiful but also highly effective.

Before You Drag and Drop: The Planning Phase

Incredible design doesn't start with opening an application, it starts with a plan. Rushing into the build without a clear strategy is the fastest way to create a dashboard that looks cluttered and serves no real purpose. Before you touch a single visual, lay the groundwork first.

Understand Your Audience and Their Goals

The first and most important rule of dashboard design is to know who you’re designing for. A report built for a CEO looks very different from one built for a social media manager. Ask yourself these key questions:

• Who is using this report? Are they C-level executives, sales reps, marketing analysts, or operations managers?
• What are their primary questions? An executive might want a high-level view of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and profitability. A marketing analyst needs to see a breakdown of cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS).
• How data-savvy are they? Some users might be comfortable with complex scatter plots and detailed tables, while others might need simple KPI cards and bar charts.
• What action will they take based on the data? A great dashboard doesn't just present information, it prompts action. If sales are down in a particular region, the design should make that clear so a sales manager knows where to focus their team's efforts.

Answering these questions first ensures that every element you add to your report serves a clear purpose for your intended audience.

Sketch It Out: Low-Fidelity Wireframing

Once you know your audience and their goals, resist the urge to jump directly into Power BI. Instead, grab a pen and paper, use a whiteboard, or open a simple wireframing tool like Figma or Balsamiq. Creating a low-fidelity sketch allows you to focus purely on layout and information hierarchy without getting bogged down by colors, fonts, or chart configurations.

Your wireframe should map out a grid for your visuals. Decide where key information will live. The general rule is to follow how people naturally read a page - from top to bottom and left to right. This means your most critical, high-level information should occupy the top-left corner of the page. Structure your report's content to guide your user from overview to details:

• Top Section: KPIs and summary cards (e.g., Total Revenue, Total Users, Avg. Session Duration).
• Middle Section: Core charts and graphs showing trends and comparisons (e.g., Revenue over time, Sales by Product Category).
• Bottom Section: Granular, detailed data (e.g., a table showing specific sales transactions or customer details).

This "overview first, zoom and filter, details on demand" approach makes your dashboard intuitive and easy to digest.

Building Your Canvas: Layout and Structure

With a clear plan in hand, you can now start building within the Power BI canvas. A well-organized structure is the foundation of a professional-looking report. It’s the invisible framework that makes the difference between a mess and a masterpiece.

Grids and Alignment are Your Best Friends

Nothing screams "amateur" quite like misaligned visuals. A clean, organized layout helps the viewer process information more efficiently. Use a grid to establish a sense of order and professionalism. In Power BI, you can do this by going to the View tab and checking the boxes for Show gridlines and Snap to grid. This makes it incredibly easy to align the edges of your charts, cards, and slicers, creating a sharp, polished look.

Give Your Report Breathing Room with White Space

White space - often called negative space - is the empty area around your visuals. It's not wasted space, it’s an active element in your design. Proper spacing reduces cognitive load, making your report feel less cramped and easier to read. Avoid the temptation to fill every pixel of the canvas. Instead, maintain consistent margins and padding between all your elements to create a clean, modern aesthetic.

The Aesthetics: Color, Themes, and Fonts

With an organized layout in place, it’s time to focus on the elements that create visual appeal and reinforce your brand's identity. This is where you can infuse personality into your report while ensuring clarity and readability remain the top priorities.

Develop a Cohesive Color Palette

Say goodbye to the default Power BI color themes. A custom color palette makes your report look branded and intentional. Here are a few tips for choosing your colors:

• Use Your Brand's Colors: The easiest and often most effective method is to use your company's established brand colors. This fosters consistency across all company materials.
• Less is More: Don't use too many colors. Stick to a palette of 2-3 primary colors for most of your charts and one bold accent color to highlight critical takeaways or call out specific data points. A neutral background like white or a very light gray is almost always your best bet.
• Be Mindful of Accessibility: Roughly 1 in 12 men has some form of color blindness. Avoid using red/green combinations to show contrast. Whenever you use color to convey meaning (e.g., green for good, red for bad), always supplement it with another indicator like an icon or text label.
• Use Color to Categorize: Each bar that says east should be the same color across all of your visualizations whenever there is consistency. This will help reduce the cognitive load for the human that is looking at the report.

Save Time with Power BI Themes

Manually updating the color, font, and style of every single visual is tedious and prone to error. Power BI's theme feature is a game-changer. You can create a simple JSON file that defines your color palette, font sizes, visual backgrounds, and dozens of other properties. Once created, you can import this theme into any Power BI report, automatically applying your branded styles to all existing and future visuals. This not only saves an immense amount of time but guarantees absolute consistency across all of your reports.

Choose Fonts for Clarity

Typography plays a critical role in report design. The goal is to make text effortless to read. Stick to these simple rules:

• Limit Your Fonts: Use one or two font families at most. A clean, professional sans-serif font like Segoe UI (Power BI's default), Arial, or Calibri works well for both headings and body text.
• Create a Clear Hierarchy: Use size and weight to distinguish between titles, KPIs, and labels. For instance, your report title should be the largest, followed by visual titles, then KPI numbers, and finally, smaller axis and data labels.
• Check for Contrast: Ensure your font color has enough contrast with the background to be easily readable. Dark gray text on a white background is often less harsh on the eyes than pure black.

Choosing the Right Visual for the Job

Even with great design, a beautiful chart is useless if it doesn't clearly communicate the data. Using the wrong visual for your data is like trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver - it just doesn't work. Each chart type has a specific job to do.

• Cards and KPIs: Perfect for showing a single, critical number like total revenue or conversion rate.
• Line Charts: The best choice for visualizing a trend over a continuous period of time (e.g., monthly website traffic over the past year).
• Bar/Column Charts: Use these for comparing values across different categories (e.g., sales by region or marketing spend by channel). Horizontal bar charts work especially well when you have long category labels.
• Pie & Donut Charts: Use these sparingly to show parts of a whole when you have fewer than five categories. More categories and they become hard to read. A bar chart is very often a better alternative.
• Tables and Matrices: When you need to show precise values or allow users to look up specific information, tables are unbeatable.
• Maps: Obviously, when your data has a geographic component, like sales distribution by state.

Enhancing the User Experience

A great Power BI report doesn’t just look good, it feels good to use. The final layer of design is user experience (UX), which focuses on making your report interactive and intuitive.

Add Purposeful Interactivity

Give users the power to explore the data on their own terms with interactive elements. Position Slicers and Filters intentionally, typically in a dedicated vertical pane on the left or horizontally across the top of the report. This keeps your dashboard clean and provides a predictable user experience.

Dive into Power BI's Bookmarks and Pages functionality. They allow you to save specific "states" of a report - such as a certain set of filters applied or visuals shown/hidden. When a user opens a page, they can now have their own unique set of filtering criteria and won't have to rebuild it every time. You can think about this functionality in Google Analytics called 'reports', that will 'remember' your specific settings so a specific team isn’t having to recreate their reporting at an ad-hoc cadence.

Customize Tooltips

Tooltips are an underrated feature for improving UX. Instead of showing the default tooltip when a user hovers over a data point, you can create a custom report page to act as a tooltip. This lets you display a small chart or additional KPIs that provide extra context without cluttering the main dashboard view. For example, hovering over a single month on a line sales chart could pop up a mini donut chart showing the product category breakdown for that specific month.

Final Thoughts

Designing a great Power BI dashboard is less about artistic talent and more about a thoughtful, user-centric process. By focusing on a clear plan, logical layout, clean aesthetics, and interactive enhancements, you can create reports that not only present data but deliver genuine, actionable insights to your team.

The time and expertise needed to master design best practices in tools like Power BI can be out of reach for many teams. This is why we created Graphed. We believe everyone should be able to get answers from their data without spending weeks learning complex software. Just connect your data sources, describe the dashboard you need in simple terms, and our AI builds a beautiful, professional, and real-time report for you in seconds. It allows you to skip straight to the insights and focus on growing your business.