Behind the Scenes I'm joining Possible This week I had my first day at Possible, a London-based climate charity. My official job title is "data visualization designer", which will involve creating data visualizations, infographics and maps
2020 in Review 2020 in Review: Information Design A year ago I wrote that "I have a love/hate relationship with roundup posts. I love reading them. I hate writing them." Well, it turns out that writing a
Dataviz The Weight of the World The total mass of humankind is now ten times greater than the total mass of all wild terrestrial mammals - and that's before you account for domesticated animals, which account
Dataviz How Green is Your Stimulus? Different countries have dramatically different plans to restore their economies in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Leading economists have called for a "green recovery", but only a handful of
Dataviz Emissions Inequality The world's richest 10% (that's you, most likely) are responsible for almost half of global emissions. The poorest half of the world's population? Just 7%. Here's a new visualization I've
Dataviz Climate Breakdown Beating climate change requires understanding the causes. Here’s a new graphic I’ve made that breaks down global emissions from 2016 (the latest year with global data available). Data
Completed Work Climate Solutions for Cities One of the last projects I worked on before I left Information is Beautiful was a graphic for E.on Energy about greenhouse gas emissions in cities, and how we
Dataviz Data Journalism Advice For Science Writers I was interviewed for a nice piece on The Open Notebook about data journalism for science writers. Interrogating Data: A Science Writer’s Guide to Data Journalism As with all
Completed Work Lighthouses of England and Wales, 1911 Inspired by The Historical Light Aids to Navigation dataset, via Jeremy Singer-Vine's wonderful Data is Plural newsletter, here's a map of the lighthouses surrounding the coasts of England and Wales
Dataviz Should you study a masters degree in data visualization? Quite often, I get asked about careers in data visualization by people who want to get into the field - either at the start of their career or in the
Behind the Scenes How to Start Dataviz Sketching Last week, I was invited to be a panellist on the Data Visualization Society's latest "fireside chat", talking about the ways I use sketching in my visualization process. It was
Dataviz Introducing Dataplotter I've been working on a new series of videos for my nascent pen plotter YouTube channel (Plottervision), drawing and narrating data stories. It's called Dataplotter. In it, I'm doing something
Dataviz Defining Information Design, Data Visualization and Infographics This morning, in the Data Visualization Society's wonderful Slack community, Jane Zhang asked a question. She asked: Has there been any good articles that are well-thought out that try to
Completed Work 20 Years of Human Presence on the International Space Station A few weeks back, I collaborated with Katarina Eriksson of Märka Design to create a visualization of the inhabitants of the International Space Station over the years. It was an
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
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
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
