I’ve always wanted to write a book, at least I think I’ve always wanted to. There are lots of reasons: the new challenge, the satisfaction and “legacy” of a physical publication, and, specifically, a productive use of my time during a difficult year or two as I enter the second half of my first decade […]
Category: visualisations
What is Modular Information Design?
I could have entitled this “How do we visualise complexity?”. But that might have been confusing for two reasons. This post is a review of Visualising Complexity by Nicole Lachenmeier and Darjan Hil of Superdot Studio – a captivating book which is subtitled “Modular Information Design Handbook”. The book systematically and graphically details their bespoke […]
Why is the NYT spiral graph getting so much attention?
Let’s start by explaining what “the NYT spiral graph” is, since that’s not a very specific explanation for one particular chart. But the fact is, if you’re part of the data visualisation community, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few days, you’ll almost certainly have seen this chart more than once. […]
What happens when you combine red and blue?
This is not a post about colour theory, though colour theory is on my mind due to my current reading matter. If you’re interested in colour theory then I hope you’re keeping abreast of my book reviews this year. They’re all here on this blog under the #bookreview tag and Josef Albers’ legendary book – […]
Why do I use flowers to visualise data?
My most recent visualisation could probably be described as an unnecessary visualisation but that’s never stopped me before. I was looking to visualise information on the Premier League and the changing squads of each of the twenty teams, and I chose to represent the teams using flowers: Click through to the online version to toggle […]
What alternative ways are there for visualising timelines?
In my last post I led up to a first draft of a timeline chart featuring the lifespans of US presidents. Without further ado, here’s the final version: There were quite a few changes from the previous version, mostly with the addition of bars to indicate number of future and ex- presidents alive at any […]
So, what were the chances of that?!
This weekend (I’m writing this on a Tuesday evening) there’s the deadline for entering the second feeder contest for Iron Viz. Iron Viz is one of the highlights of every Tableau Conference, where three winners of the feeder contests perform on stage in front of 12000 or so people to produce an amazing viz in […]
Why do we visualise using circles?
I should clarify – if the books of Tufte and Few are your visualisation bibles then you may not enjoy this post. Rightly so, the two authors I’ve just mentioned are seen as the foremost proponents of the field of creating professional, analytical dashboard visualisations. But for those who enjoy data visualisation as data art, […]
Do we publish visualisations just for the attention?
A week or so ago I wrote three-quarters of a blog post about this, inspired by the attention that my Africa tile map viz was getting. I ran out of time and “parked it”, heading off to the Tableau Conference in London To summarise my first (unpublished) post: I compared a data visualiser publishing her […]