When I was in middle school, a cool girl invited me to her birthday party at the country club. I wanted to impress, so bad. This was not my place. These were not my people. But I was gonna try. So, after luscious cupcakes, I climbed the ladder at…
The 3 Second Rule
The 3 Second Rule is a major orienting principle that guides the way we make graphs at Evergreen Data. Because our goal around here is to make graphs that are so freakin good, people quickly grasp what we’re laying down and they want more. You probably have that goal too.
Questions to Ask When Examining a Graph
Does the story told in the headline match the data used to bolster it? It’s really common for people to read a tweet and take it as the truth. Especially when it comes from official accounts like the White House. And while the Trump White House was notorious for it’s…
When to Viz
One of the biggest barriers to making great data visualization is the time it takes to do so. But that’s typically because we wait to start visualizing until it’s late in the game. This post is on when to viz. The Typical Data Visualization Process Let’s say you want to…
Better Posters
I have a big ask. I want you to set aside three and a half minutes of your life (I know that’s a gajillion years these days) to watch Mike Morrison. I promise, he’ll make your heart sing. Mike’s right. The way we talk about data has to change.
Graphs Need a Personal Bubble
You know that one friend who is otherwise nice enough but he stands inside your personal bubble? Like, even before the pandemic, he just needed to take one healthy step back. You’re cool, you’re just up in my space. Right. Just like you want a little breathing room,…
Sharpen your Clutter Detector
Clutter shows up as all the unnecessary little things in your graph – anything that isn’t contributing to engagement with the data. You might think the little stuff can be overlooked but when you accumulate multiple graphs and their clutter into a dashboard, it feels too busy and overwhelming and…
3 Reasons Academics Need to Get Better at Graphs
This is one of the best worst graphs of all time. It was published, no surprise, in an academic journal. It used to be that mediocre data viz was acceptable for academics because journals had limitations on what they could do with color and…
How to Create a Data Viz Position for Yourself
Tameeka emailed me this: βI’ve been a researcher for 10+ years but my passion and strength really is data viz. I’m trying to figure out how/where I can do that more than other research stuff. Should I start my own data viz business? Any chance you’d be down for like…
When You Shouldn’t Hire a Data Viz Consultant
Hiring consultants to conduct studies can be an excellent means of turning problems into gold, your problems into their gold.– Martin Marietta Cheeky, Martin. But there’s some truth to that – consultants are expensive. In 99.98% of my consulting projects, my clients get so much value that…