My personal projects are my escape from reality—each one its own little world that rewards slow, diligent work. I enjoy watching them evolve from nothing or a forgotten something into a brand new thing for others to enjoy. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t making something and I love it.

Nicholas's process is intricate, exacting, and inspiring. That something I made might make its way into it brings me considerable joy.

New Year, New Colour Tool for you data visualizers and maybe the odd designer obumbratta.com/colour

So glad to hear this. I have many many links that should now be unbroken.

Since you folks seem to like lengthy threads, let's look at visualizing distributions. I'll visualize one data set 16 ways and give some other examples of each chart type. #dataViz

Speaking of labyrinthine contortions, though, here's a little thread of some of my favourite viz over the years.

Woah!! My old animation made it into Joey's mega-thread on animation in visualization. I was shocked to see this! This thread is incredible. It's hard to overstate how informative and impressive the thread is. It's really helpful!

What is #dataviz animation good for? An updated thread with examples.

Super excited for this.

I like how this chart makeover uses the same chart type and even the same layout but by focusing on colours and labelling it significantly improves the ease with which it can be interpreted

I worked on this project with the tremendous team at Voilà. I really care about the user experience in all my projects so I'm quite chuffed we we an honouree for "best user experience" from the Webby Awards.

Dotplots With good defaulta it beats the obvious alternatives, scales better than people think (like 10000+ data points) and isn't as sensitive to binwidth or bandwidth estimators Density? Nope dotplot Histogram? Nope dotplot Violin? Nope dotplot

I love these Ovechkin shot placement maps from @evolving-hockey.com & @theathletic.bsky.social Unfortunately, I can’t find the gift link button: www.nytimes.com/athletic/623... 📊#dataviz

I return to @johnnelsonmaps.bsky.social 's Silly Geographic Precision table whenever I see the coordinates in a file I'm trying to make smaller. Latest file was mapping atoms. uxblog.idvsolutions.com/2013/11/sill...

Nifty design: You can take advantage of left-to-right reading to tell a story with your labels. Here, FT could have put "They represent the working class" on the right axis next to other labels, but this layout causes you to focus on it *first*, and then pay attention to its decline.

It is fine to start your line chart axes at something other than zero, especially when small variations are important. You can give hints that your axis doesn’t start at zero by
placing additional space below the data, removing the baseline, and/or adding a broken axis symbol 📊 #VizTips

It's always interesting to see all the steps that go into creating something that looks "simple" and remains intuitive.

Wealthsimple's newsletter this month actually has an excellent section on chart crimes. tldr-archive.wealthsimple.com/archive/33-%... Some great examples and explanation in there, which doesn't always happen when newsletter or blog content strays into our area of expertise.

Describing this as a "technique to avoid misleading the viewer" feels like AI is misleading the reader. "It's a feature not a bug".

These were both great! (And lots of other links to read, too.) This bit resonated with me: “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I can read box plots just fine and so can the audiences for my charts.” Experts often don’t realize how much work it took to *become* an expert.

Some talented folks on this Judging Panel and then there is this one dude who looks a lot like me... and has the same name as me... uh oh, that might actually be me.

For the R users out there

Nicholas's process walk throughs are unbelievably good... the tedium in excellence is awe inspiring.

Happy New Year! Kick it off by enjoying my rant about beautiful but unintuitive hotel shower faucets and what they might teach us about charts that prioritize beauty over usefulness. www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-kind...

Do we have any working theory on why so many companies suck at this? Their job is to communicate an email update. The original actively buries it. Joey's redesign is perfect, but also accessible to mere humans. And yet. Anyway, brillant work Joey, as always. #redesign

You can explore *and search* the US budget in this interactive visual I made with the phenomenal @amberthomas.bsky.social usafacts.org/government-s...

Each month I receive this email from TransUnion and each month I have to struggle to determine if everything is okay. Intentional information design can make it better. #unsolicitedRedesign

The Skrillex track is crazy

Using dots instead of bars can reduce the heaviness of a chart with many items.

Stacked charts can obscure patterns in data. Only the first series and total afford easy interpretation. Unless those two are more important than the rest, consider breaking things up into multiple smaller charts to understand both proportions and patterns for each of your series.

Your map’s legend can be turned into a histogram, helping your audience understand the distribution in addition to decoding the colours.

Horizontal bar charts provide room for longer titles and keep your audience from having to tilt their heads.

Maps are for context. Simplified, desaturated maps pushed to the background allow your data points to pop.

Direct labeling makes it easier to quickly interpret the visuals, allowing the viewer to find the information they need right where they need it.

Sorting by the data values instead of alphabetically creates a cleaner chart and makes rankings immediately apparent. #VizTips

I want to write a book called The Graphs of Wrath Don't know what it's about yet, but with a title like that, how can it possibly fail. @infowetrust.com perhaps a new Visionary Press title?

Curious how viz community uptick on bluesky will impact the DVS slack channels. Seems like interactions over there might drop as more people engage over here. cc @elijahmeeks.bsky.social

This explains a lot about why it's hard to sleep sometimes.

We do this with clients who bring us unclear charts. We ask them to say this sentence while showing us the chart. It can quickly reveal that what they want to say is not highlighted in the encoding, sometimes it's not even there, or sometimes it's not really interesting.

Introducing <NumberFlow> for @svelte.dev (4 & 5): Transition, format, and localize numbers. Built on Intl.NumberFormat and Web Animations. Dependency-free. Accessible. Customizable. number-flow.barvian.me/svelte Thank you @rich-harris.dev + team for all your work on this framework 🧡

Data looks better naked: Map edition

Data looks better naked: Pie chart edition

Data looks better naked: Tables edition

Now that I've finally made the move, I'm reposting one of my favourite things I made during my PhD: 1 year of output from a regional simulation of the SW Indian Ocean (colours show SST). We often use neat schematic diagrams to represent ocean currents but in reality, it's a rather turbulent mess!

Data looks better naked: the original

Gonna start by reposting some content from twitter. Seems a shame for it not to exist where the community is.

@albertocairo.bsky.social is thefunctionalart.com no more?