Behind the Scenes Blogroll: The Blogs I Love Remember when everyone had a blogroll? You probably do not, but I do. It was wonderful to see what the people you read were reading. So, in no particular order except a loose categorisation, here's the list of blogs I like the most at the time of writing.
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
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
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: 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
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.
Behind the Scenes Work in Progress #5 Mont Poupet and Nans Sous St Anne, in Franche Comte. Thanks to @humeursdevictor [https://twitter.com/humeursdevictor] for the link to better topographic data [https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/datasets/bd-alti-r-75-m-250-m-1-000-m/] for France. The tiled heightmap for the whole country is a lovely mix of organic and synthetic, and
Behind the Scenes Work in Progress #4 Anyone know a good source of high-resolution elevation data for France?
Worknotes Tenday Notes: 11-20 Feb 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/]. I've been struggling to name a new
Sketchbook Pages Sketchbook Pages #3 More pages from my sketchbook. I clearly don't know how to draw voronoi diagrams, but you get the idea. The line charts are my favourite!
Worknotes Tenday Notes: 1-10 Feb 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/]. The last ten days have mostly been about finishing
Behind the Scenes A New Approach One month of daily posts on my new workblog! Yay! But already it's starting to feel like a bit of a chore each day, and quite often I end up putting things in a queue and publishing them a few days after the rest of the internet is
Dataviz Google's Dataset Search Is No Longer in Beta Rejoice, number-hunters - Google's Dataset Search tool [https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/] is now officially out of beta. According to a blog post [https://blog.google/products/search/discovering-millions-datasets-web], the search giant has indexed almost 25 million datasets. The tool previously delivered a scattershot of vaguely-related bits of
Behind the Scenes Population of Swedish Urban Areas Or "Befolkning i Svenska Tätorter", if you like. A quick map that I was working on a while back. It's still not quite there - it needs a legend, and maybe a bit of artworking. But right now I'm struggling to get my beloved
Behind the Scenes Defending the Truth There's an interesting line in the latest FlowingData newsletter [https://flowingdata.com/2020/01/16/process-72-misleading-map/]. > It's difficult to plan for every single interpretation and use of your visualization once it enters the internet ethers. It's impossible to control. Nathan is writing about
Music Dymaxion Rotation Discovering new music has become more difficult for me in recent years, for two key reasons. The first is that I've had less time to spend reading the music press, which was always my favourite source of recommendations. The second is that music itself has splintered into zillions
Behind the Scenes Sketchbook Pages #2 Every few days I try and fill a page in a sketchbook with visual ideas that don't have any data behind them. I pick a theme, then execute on it in a few different ways. Here are a few recent pages:
Inspiration Atomic Habits & Cadence For the last few months, I've been trying to cultivate better habits. Much of this was after reading James Clear's Atomic Habits [https://amzn.to/36ReVE3], which is the best self-help book I've read in some time. It's simple, clear, exactly as
Tools I Love Tools I Love #1: Copic Multiliner SP Tools are important [https://blog.duncangeere.com/data-visualization-tools/]. A good tool not only removes barriers between you and what you want to do, but makes doing that thing delightful. That's why I want to share with you my current favourite pen. It's the Copic Multiliner SP
Behind the Scenes Sketchbook Pages #1 Every few days I try and fill a page in a sketchbook with visual ideas that don't have any data behind them. I pick a theme, then execute on it in a few different ways. I've not been doing it very long, but I've
Site Admin Bar & Line? My workblog is called Bar & Line. I wanted to name it for three reasons. 1. I like the name "Bar & Line" a lot. It's classy, and a little funny. I wanted to lay my claim to it, in case I want to use it
