When I started drawing comics, back in the early 2010s, there were these really popular animations put together by the Royalty Society of Arts (RSA) in London. My comics have always been pretty …
Who is the Hero? Storytelling Methods for Data People.
Good stories always have heroes, even data stories. So who is the hero in your story? So technically, a story is just a sequence of events. And you can layout a sequence of events without the use …
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What is Card Sorting? UX Methods for Data People
Card sorting is a user experience research method useful in discovering how people organize and prioritize different topics. The method is pretty simple. You start with a set of topics on …
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How to become a data designer.
Ever wonder why some data teams deliver really nice looking reports while others seem like they're stuck in the late 90s? The more I work with different research and evaluation teams, the more I …
Building Your Creativity Toolkit
“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating” These are words that came from comedy icon, John Cleese. Head to YouTube if you want to watch one of his talks on creativity, and the source …
3 lessons learned about online courses in early 2024
I launched my first online workshop in late 2015. I had this idea that it would be best to start, whether or not I had everything ready in advance. And as we went, I would listen to the needs of …
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Should DataViz be Easy?
For Christmas dinner this year I made my family spinach and pasta rotolo. It's a baked pasta dish that involved making fresh pasta, rolling it flat, filling it with a spinach/ricotta mixture, and …
The 3 things you need to become a better data designer (not one is about tech).
Do you want to improve your data visualization design and reporting skills? Stop worrying about technology. The technology part of data visualization design has gotten easier and easier over the …
Access is NOT a Vanity Metric
Do you ever think about the amount of work that goes into a conference presentation? How many hours do people spend planning their conference proposal, meeting with collaborators, putting together …
Make Me Think
There is this fantastic book on usability written by Steve Krug called, Don't Make Me Think. It's not new, first released out all the way back in 2000. But if you have never read it, you should. …
Accessibility is NOT a Checklist
It's time to change how we think about accessibility. For just about half of my career I worked at company called Westat on a variety of different federal contracts. And when you work on federal …
What is social object theory?
You might know a lot about social networks, but what do you know about social objects? Resources Social Objects for Beginners (Gaping Void)What are Social Objects? [I totally forgot I created …