Information Design Critique — Executive Financial Dashboard
Two-week contract · Remote · Fixed fee · Single-family office
The engagement
We are a single-family office running a multi-entity operating group — restaurants, catering and events co., seed investments, real estate, and an investment portfolios. Over the past year we have built an executive financial platform on Azure Databricks: consolidated entity reporting, free cash flow model, and a probability engine that scores progress toward a long-range treasury target.
The engine works. A recent independent check reproduced its output to within a fraction of a point. However, the review also produced fifteen findings; a column whose label implied the opposite of what it computed, one term carrying two different values on adjacent screens, a cumulative row presented on a monthly grid, a status badge that was an artifact of its own comparison basis. Every one of those was visible on the page itself.
We could not see them, because we already know what every number means. That is precisely why we are hiring you.
What you will do
●      Review four to six dashboard pages at a pace of roughly one page every two to three working days.
●      Annotate every element with what it does to the reader, what it obscures, and what should replace it.
●      Rank findings by reader consequence and what causes a principal to misread a figure, as distinct from what is merely inelegant.
●      Give us a short set of layout principles that generalize to pages not yet built.
The deliverable
An annotated critique document, a marked-up PDF or equivalent. Not a slide deck, not a Figma file, not a redesign. Our engineer implements from your document.
To be direct about scope: we are not asking for new comps. If the instinct to start drawing is strong, this is not the right engagement.
You are likely a fit if
●      You have designed financial data products for portfolio reporting, wealth platforms, market data terminals, or clinical and other safety-critical displays where misreading a number carries consequences.
●      You reason about what a reader will conclude, not only about what looks correct.
●      You can write criticism that is direct, specific, and usable by an engineer who was not in the room.
●      You work in the perceptual and analytical tradition, Tufte, Bertin, Cleveland, rather than the decorative one.
You are likely not a fit if
●      Your portfolio is primarily infographics, editorial data journalism, or data art. Excellent work, different discipline.
●      You would propose a discovery phase, stakeholder workshops, or a design system. We have scoped this deliberately narrowly.
●      You lead with tool proficiency rather than with reasoning about readers.
 
 
 
Process
We pay for a one-hour written teardown of a single page before selecting a finalist $400–$600, no obligation on either side. The page is anonymized, with entity names changed and all values scaled, so no NDA is required to participate. An NDA applies only to the selected candidate.
Fixed fee for the full engagement, half on start and half on acceptance. Work for hire.
To apply
Send a short note and two or three examples of dense, information-heavy work you have designed or critiqued. We are more interested in your reasoning about one project than in a broad portfolio.
One optional question, which we will read carefully: describe a time you told a client that a chart they liked was misleading them, and what happened next.

Joel Dondis · Managing Member · JGC Capital Holdings LLC