Half of the people in my data visualization workshops don’t even realize there’s a style guide lurking around somewhere in their organization, but chances are the Communications department has been begging people to use the style guide all this time. One big reason more folks don’t adhere to the…
Once a season I’ll get an itch to overhaul some part of my house. It’s an old house, so it usually happens that in the process of fixing one problem, we identify another that will send me back to my local hardware store and double the length of the project.
Everyone knows that when Katie Porter pulls out the whiteboard, someone is about to get schooled. This time, let us be the students. This video is a masterclass in data storytelling. And not just because she uses a chart. Let’s breakdown what you can learn from watching an expert make…
Here’s the thing: Your graph isn’t ever just going to chill out in your Excel file or Tableau worksheet. It’s going to live a life elsewhere, like in a dashboard, a slide, or a webpage. So when we make our graphs, we have to think about their future home environment.
The morning that I’m writing this blog post, the US has just asked for a pause on the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine because 6 women have experienced blood clots. That’s 6 cases out of the 6.8 million J & J vaccines administered, or 0.0000882%. This is…
While ANY chart can fight for equality, if you plug the right data into it, these four in particular make the story jump off the screen.
Over in our private Academy Slack group, one of our members asked a solid, totally not snarky question about log scales. They’ve been common in visuals about COVID and there’s a fair question out there about how appropriate those are in graphs aimed at public consumption.
When you spend the bulk of young adulthood in research-focused academic institutions, like I did, you are steeped in a culture that tells you, explicitly or implicitly, that you can’t ever really make a claim. Taking a position on something can be seen as biased. Claiming an insight can be…
The theme of this blog post can be summed up with one emoji: >.< If you aren’t emoji-fluent, that’s the facepalm, a gesture made when you are internally dying of embarrassment over someone’s incompetence. In this case, that someone is me. I have failed to recognize when I was using…
If you’ve ever been in the audience of one of my workshops, you can tell that I was once a teacher. I use the same classroom management skills when I teach 100 adults how to graph as I did when I was teaching 25 kindergartners how to read. Back…
