Inspiration - Bar & Line

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 these things, a long interview was cut down to a short series of quotes. But I think my interviewer, Betsy

Behind the Scenes

Society Centred Design

If you work in the design space, or with designers, then you'll likely have heard of human-centred design. It's a concept which states that well-designed products and services are those where the designer considers how people will use the product/service, and validates those assumptions in real-world tests. It's an

Inspiration

Active Participation

There was a great piece by Kevin Roose in the New York Times 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 the way it's supposed to be used - "to connect with one

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. It makes great use of the scrollytelling format. But I wanted to highlight

Music

In My Head

A few weeks back, I appeared on a local radio station for a show called "In Your Head". It's a bit like Desert Island Discs - they invite someone on the show, and get to know them through a playlist that they've chosen. Now my episode has been posted online.

Inspiration

Centring the Reader

Charles-Joseph Minard was a 19th-century civil engineer, who become famous for his early contributions to information design. You've almost certainly seen his map of Napoleon's disastrous 1812 Russia campaign. But his work extends far further, and RJ Andrews has just published a new translation of Minard's 1861 summary of his

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 show how different parts of the UK government are structured (or were in 2014, anyway). Okay, so maybe they're just

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 food, and the coloured chunks represent where the emisisons come from - the key is at the top. The main

Design

There Are Only 10 Types of Movies

“Can I copy your homework?” “Okay, but don’t make it too obvious.” 2. Sexy legs pic.twitter.com/0IujkDyRKi — 𝕃𝔼𝔼 (@leesteffen) January 14, 2020 Click through for the full ten.

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 of Marie Neurath. Marie Neurath was the wife of Otto Neurath, inventor of Isotype. But her influence on and work

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 this one by Francis Galton is the first-known. It shows travel times in 1881 to different parts of the world.

Design

Scripter: Sketching with Code

If you love Figma as much as I do, this may excite you. All-round smart dude Rasmus Andersson has built a Figma plugin called Scripter that lets you write simple scripts (in Typescript) to play with the Figma API. That means algorithmically generating rectangles, for example. Or playing with timers

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, which is the best self-help book I've read in some time. It's simple, clear, exactly as long as it needs to be, and comes in nice bite-sized chunks

Inspiration

Beginning

I have a newsletter called Beginning, but today I'd like to share a cartoon by Grant Snider with the same title. New comic! Beginning pic.twitter.com/SfK3VK7ks9 — Grant Snider (@grantdraws) January 3, 2020 Feels appropriate for the new year.

Inspiration

Girih Tiles

Some interpretations of Islam include a ban of depiction of animate beings, so much of religious Islamic art is geometric in nature instead. A few years back, I picked up the Islamic Design Workbook, by Eric Broug, at the V&A Museum in London. It gives you the underlying

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. It covers the key people and

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 replicate it with another dataset sometime.

Inspiration

Peak Map

Ridgeline plots (formerly known as joyplots - read the explanation for the name change) are a lovely way of displaying topography. Peak Map is a website created by Andrei Kashcha that lets you go to anywhere on Earth and make a ridgeline plot of the local geography. Andrei writes: I'm