Writing A Dashboard for Planet Earth Over on Nightingale, the Journal of the Data Visualization Society, I've written a 3,000 word feature on one of my favourite environmental visuals - the planetary boundary graphic. Here's a excerpt, from a section where the coordinator of the international Planetary Boundaries Research Network critiques
Sketchbook Pages Sketchbook Pages #6 Back to charts for my latest set of sketchbook pages. Lexis diagrams [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexis_diagram], area charts, a xenographic [https://xeno.graphics/] concept called treemap bars that I really like for hierarchical data, and some new approaches on stacked bars. Enjoy!
Dataviz The Logpile Chart A couple of months back, an idea came to me in a dream. That sounds ridiculous, I know, but it's true. I woke up one morning with a clear-as-crystal picture in my head of a kind of chart that I hadn't seen before. The problem that
Plotter A Weekend With a Plotter It was pretty good timing that my plotter arrived just before the Easter weekend. I had a full four days to experiment with it and start to get to grips with how it works. Here are my experiences. Unboxing and Setup I ordered my Axidraw V3/A3 from Robotshop.eu
Worknotes Tenday Notes 1 April - 10 April 2020 Every ten days [https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Tenday] I share a quick digest of what I've been working on. Here's the latest. You can find more in the series here [https://blog.duncangeere.com/tag/tenday-notes/]. Since starting university in 2002 I've always
Plotter A Wild Plotter Appears! I'm extremely excited to say that I'm now the proud owner of a pen plotter. Specifically, the Axidraw V3/A3 [https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/890#]. I had a grand plan [https://blog.duncangeere.com/tenday-notes-22-31-march-2020/] to save up money slowly over time to buy it,
Behind the Scenes Hello From Duncan About a year ago I pivoted my newsletter [https://buttondown.email/duncangeere] to be about beginnings, but then it turned out I didn't have a lot of beginnings to write about and sometimes I wanted to say hi to people but didn't have a beginning so
Sketchbook Pages Sketchbook Pages #5 Oops! It's been more than a month since I last published sketchbook pages. My only excuse is that I've been caught up in generative art [https://blog.duncangeere.com/tag/generative-art/] instead. As such, here are four sketchbook pages inspired by the #generativedice hashtag [https://twitter.
Worknotes Tenday Notes 22-31 March 2020 Every ten days [https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Tenday] I share a quick digest of what I've been working on. Here's the latest. You can find more in the series here [https://blog.duncangeere.com/tag/tenday-notes/]. Ruby is a programming language that I've
Inspiration Society Centred Design If you work in the design space, or with designers, then you'll likely have heard of human-centred design [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-centered_design]. It's a concept which states that well-designed products and services are those where the designer considers how people will use the
Generative Art Mountain Drive I spent a chunky part of the last 24 hours or so learning about noise. Specifically, about Perlin noise [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise] - a way to generate random numbers that feel more organic and less, well, random. When I learn something I like to use that
Inspiration Active Participation There was a great piece by Kevin Roose in the New York Times [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/technology/coronavirus-how-to-live-online.html] last week, which has only just filtered through the streams to reach me. It's about how Covid-19 has forced us to use the internet in
Tools I Love Tools I Love #4: Google Sheets I don't know if I've ever made a visualization without Google Sheets [sheets.google.com]. Like the sturdy vessel of a seasoned explorer, it's fast, powerful, and a key part of almost every data journey I undertake. It's there with me when
Inspiration The World As a Subway Map The New York Times has published a good* scrollytelling piece about Covid-19, which makes use of particle flows to show how the virus spread from a single market in Wuhan to almost every country in the world [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/world/coronavirus-spread.html]. It makes
Worknotes Tenday Notes: 12-21 March 2020 Every ten days [https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Tenday] I share a quick digest of what I've been working on. Here's the latest. You can find more in the series here [https://blog.duncangeere.com/tag/tenday-notes/]. It's sometimes strange how projects move along
Music In My Head A few weeks back, I appeared on a local radio station for a show called "In Your Head [http://www.k103.se/program/inyourhead]". It's a bit like Desert Island Discs - they invite someone on the show, and get to know them through a playlist
Generative Art Beachside 1 My generative art skills are progressing faster than they might otherwise, thanks to all the time freed up that I'd normally be spending hanging out with other humans. Every cloud and all that. Here's my latest piece, which employed a bunch of techniques I've
Writing How to Identify Your Audience Often when creating something to share information - a report, a blog post, a data visualization - we're told to ask ourselves who the audience for that thing is. It's an important step. Whatever you're making should be tailored to the people who'
Worknotes Tenday Notes: 2-11 March 2020 Every ten days [https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Tenday] I share a quick digest of what I've been working on. Here's the latest. You can find more in the series here [https://blog.duncangeere.com/tag/tenday-notes/]. My work on the Drawdown project has been published!
From the Archive From the Archive: Fowl Plague Back in 2017, I worked on a series of articles about the risk of a major pandemic for How We Get To Next. The series was called Fowl Plague [https://howwegettonext.com/fowl-plague-82f020309aaa] - not my pun, unfortunately, but the original name for avian influenza when it was discovered in
Worknotes Tenday Notes: 21 Feb - 1 Mar 2020 Every ten days [https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Tenday] I share a quick digest of what I've been working on. Here's the latest. You can find more in the series here [https://blog.duncangeere.com/tag/tenday-notes/]. A hundred days ago, I began following a new
Completed Work Climate Change Solutions Towards the end of 2019, the team at Project Drawdown [https://www.drawdown.org/] got in touch to ask if I could help them out with data visualization for an update to their best-selling compendium of climate change solutions [https://www.drawdown.org/the-book]. A chance to develop graphics for
Generative Art Smoulder 1-5 I was making some generative versions of what I wanted my upcoming Carbon in Context graphic to vaguely look like. Then I put in some ridiculous values for the fun of it. One blur filter later, and I've got a set of images that capture how climate change
Generative Art Sharing Generative Sketches I've registered an Instagram account for my generative art sketches. Go check out @vhfseizures [https://www.instagram.com/vhfseizures/]. I'm not especially wild about using Instagram. Every third post in my feed is an ad these days, and often a crappy one at that. But it&
Sketchbook Pages Sketchbook Pages #4 Finished my beautiful Moomin "Håll Sverige Rent" sketchbook [https://www.muminboden.se/varumarken/putinki/mumin-anteckningsbok-mini-hsr-bla.html] ! Now to figure out a filing scheme for posterity. In the meantime, here are the last few sketches it contains.
