Tools I Love Tools I Love #4: Google Sheets I don't know if I've ever made a visualization without Google Sheets. Like the sturdy vessel of a seasoned explorer, it's fast, powerful, and a key part of almost every
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
Completed Work Climate Change Solutions Towards the end of 2019, the team at Project Drawdown got in touch to ask if I could help them out with data visualization for an update to their best-selling
Tools How Big? Hans Hack has developed a neat little tool that lets you quickly draw a circle or square with a given area on a map, and download it as a GeoJSON.
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!
Dataviz Our Future on Earth I worked on data visualization for a new FutureEarth report that connects recent news events with the latest environmental science research. Here's how it's described in the report itself: This
Experiments Make Your Own Data Glyphs With Joyful Data The folks at Gramener's Storylabs have built a "happy little tool" built on JOY.JS that allows you to create your own system for encoding data in glyphs. It's called
Inspiration The Organograms of Government What does your organisation's structure look like? You could draw an org chart, but how about an drawing an organogram instead? These charts were put together by Peter Cook, and
Dataviz Food Miles Are Not As Important As You Think Our World in Data has just published a great article about the source of the emissions associated with different foods. It's a simple stacked bar chart. Each bar represents a
Dataviz Google's Dataset Search Is No Longer in Beta Rejoice, number-hunters - Google's Dataset Search tool is now officially out of beta. According to a blog post, the search giant has indexed almost 25 million datasets. The tool previously delivered a scattershot of vaguely-related bits of information from academic papers through the decades,
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
Dataviz The Missing Legacy of Marie Neurath Looking for a weekend read to dig your teeth into? You could do much worse than Jason Forrest's latest dive into the history of data visualization - The Missing Legacy
Tools I Love Tools I Love #2: Flourish The best free platform for making charts on the web is Flourish. It has the best balance of usability, chart types, customisation and export options. Flourish has been a vital
Dataviz Custom Isochrone Maps Isochrone maps are one of my favourite things. They show far you can travel from a place in a given amount of time. There are lots of classic examples, but
Completed Work The 1.5C Carbon Playbook Yesterday, a project I worked on launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It's a short and sweet guide for companies who want to keep the planet's temperature below
Behind the Scenes Defending the Truth There's an interesting line in the latest FlowingData newsletter. It's difficult to plan for every single interpretation and use of your visualization once it enters the internet ethers. It's impossible
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
Dataviz Dataviz in 2019 I have a love/hate relationship with roundup posts. I love reading them. I hate writing them. That's why I haven't really summed up my 2019. The best summary of 2019 in dataviz that I've read comes from Data Visualization Society founder Elijah Meeks.
Inspiration Alignment Chart Alignment Chart The latest XKCD goes meta D&D, though I'd argue that the alignment chart itself should be lawful evil. Actually, the soil chart (lawful good, though Wikipedia's rendition is chaotic neutral at best) is one of my all-time favourites, and I'd love to
Completed Work Sibling Travels A few days ago, I shared a hand-drawn data visualization I made for my stepfather for Christmas. I also made a similar visualization for my sister, showing the countries we've
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
Dataviz New Year Badges For my New Year's Eve party this year, I made a small collection of hand-drawn data portraits of the attendees. The goal was to give the attendees - some of
Completed Work Endangered Languages of Italy As a Christmas present for my stepfather, who is learning Italian, I drew a data visualisation showing the endagered languages spoken in Italy. The visual style is heavily inspired by
