Understanding your audience takes some research and thought, but it’s worth it. The product of those efforts, audience profiles, make everything else easier. From overall strategy to design and evaluation.
11 cartoons and posts you may have missed
So as promised, I’ve been focusing a lot of attention on building my creative workshop for data people. But while I haven’t posted here, I’ve still been cartooning. So I thought maybe once a month I would send give you a little summary post featuring some of my creative work from around the web. Many of […]
Gone Workshoppin’
So there’s this thing I gotta do. You know that whole creative workshop for data people thing that I started? I’ve come to the realization that if I want it to be successful, I need to give it everything I’ve got. So freshspectrum’s going to go quiet for a bit. Not sure for how long, […]
The secret sauce of an RSA Animate.
The secret to a great whiteboard animation is a fantastic talk. It’s not a way to make boring talks interesting, but rather make already great talks spreadable through a new channel. Check out some of Andrew Park’s work at Cognitive. When you do, think about how many of the talks really need the animation to […]
Don’t be a qualitative bully.
Today’s cartoon comes from a set I created for Michael Quinn Patton.
Why you shouldn’t decrease your data-ink ratio.
From Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information: A large share of ink on a graphic should present data-information, the ink changing as the data change. Data-ink is the non-erasable core of a graphic, the non-redundant ink arranged in response to variation in the numbers represented. Then, Data-ink ratio = data-ink / total ink used to […]
Hans Rosling as a performer.
I think we tend to undervalue Hans Rosling as a performer while hyping his data visualization. When you first watched his early *TED talks did you think, “Maybe I should create a bubble chart?” Or did you think, “I wish I could captivate an audience like that?” Originally for me it was the former and […]
Doggie Data Science on the 4th of July
Happy Fourth of July!
Austin Kleon on how to get inspiration to strike.
Austin Kleon was on Kelton Reid’s The Writer Files podcast. He said this when talking about writers block. It sparked today’s cartoon. Problems of output are problems of input.
Letting Pixar’s rules of storytelling influence your reporting.
I really believe that good data visualization, good reporting and good presentations are all about good storytelling. So I tend to search out inspiration from great storytellers. I read the post I quote below a few years ago, but find myself coming back to it over and over again. As researchers and evaluators we spend a […]
The big reason to stop coloring maps
From Let’s Tesselate: Hexagons For Tile Grid Maps by Danny DeBelius of the npr visuals team: As the saying goes, nothing is certain in this life but death, taxes and requests for geographic data to be represented on a map. For area data, the choropleth map is a tried and true visualization technique, but not without significant dangers […]
How pictures help you discover the unexpected.
From Nathan Yau in his book Visualize This: Visualization One of the best ways to explore and try to understand a large dataset is with visualization. Place the numbers into a visual space and let your brain or your readers’ brain find the patterns. We’re good at that. You can often find stories that you […]