Here’s the deal: People primarily look at pictures. That’s why we visualize data – to get people to look at it. But if we waste the short amount of attention people are willing to extend to us by showing them visuals that don’t convey…
The end of August marks an important moment for me because it is when I quit my salaried job to work on data visualization and design full time. 5 years! It remains one of my best decisions. So, I like to celebrate it with you. Last year, I launched the Evergreen Data…
Yes, I know the jig is up. All of my examples in books and workshops are pretty tidy, as if every response options was addressed by every single respondent. The truth is that life and data collection are messy. How can we show that different questions have different sample…
As I usually do in my workshops, I talked to a group in Warsaw, Poland about how we should use color intentionally in our data visualization and that, in fact, the color choice itself can help us tell our story. I prepared a little activity around this issue, in…
Few things are more tragic than excellent non-profits doing great work to help struggling families but can’t tell their story effectively. In this blog post, I’m going to step you through the redesign of a one page handout I created for my clients at the Education Development Center. Their…
One of the most common ways to analyze qualitative data is through thematic coding. Thematic coding allows us to move beyond the visualization of word or phrase frequency, like in a word cloud, and start to examine attributes and stories that emerge from the data. The New York Times…
It’s time to talk about how a highly visual, well-formatted recommendations page doesn’t have much impact when it is buried on page 104. This is how we make reporting less cumbersome, particularly in a digital reporting era. Of course your reporting will probably include a slidedeck. I mean, you could…
Long-ish reports are probably never going away entirely, so let’s make them suitable for a digital reading age. In the olden days, when we printed reports, they often had extra blank pages at the front and back. It probably gave printed materials a sense of refinement or maybe its used…
Evergreen Data Visualization Academy member Dana McGuire recently wrote me to ask about her dot plot. She said, “Would there be a way to show the bar or confidence interval somewhere? I have gotten positive feedback on the look of the graph overall, but it is a scientific conference…
Danielle, a member of my Evergreen Data Visualization Academy, submitted a question to our monthly Office Hours webinar about how to show ranking data. She sent this survey question: There are eight categories below. Rank each item to continue to the next page. Rank the following services in order…
