Hi! Somewhat difficult question to answer in a single sentence. Creating more complex dashboards or infographics often involve a mix of creativity, interesting data and of course a story to tell to hold the visual together. Everyone works differently here, and things depend on your audience, but I often start with a piece of paper to draw a basic wireframe of the desired layout. Creativity is difficult to teach, and I often find it useful to look at other examples of other users - hence the idea of pushing examples into the VA gallery. But yes, realizing - those don't come with a step-by-step guide to re-create.
I do have a couple of additional resources which may be useful:
I have written a book not too long ago which focuses on infographic design and creation. It covers the whole end to end process of designing dashboards, how to load data, what options to use/what to avoid. It also comes with a few examples for users to try out and re-create. Worthwhile reading - especially given it focuses on SAS Visual Analytics.
Our UX design team published official guidelines on report design and principles: https://communities.sas.com/html/assets/breports/index.html - It covers some general ideas and tips around what to do and to avoid when designing beautiful reports.
While not a specific step by step guide - I created two, so called speed art videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiFoAH-XWiY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz44S7N6rSg which show a fast-forward version of me creating infographics like the one in the gallery. It may give you a sense of the steps involved, visuals used, and specific layout options applied for those selected visuals.
Hope this helps. Falko
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