Blog

I recently completed an online class, Data Visualization and Infographics with D3, taught by two great teachers: Alberto Cairo and Scott Murray. I have worked on a few D3 projects from the design side before, but this was my first real foray into doing the code myself. For class exercises, I picked a dataset to work with that I cared about: youth suicides. You can see the interactive graphs I created here. Clusters of suicides among young people in our community have, understandably, caused… [read more →]

I was reading an article in Fast Company this week called The Visible Man by J.J. McCorvey about being black in Silicon Valley. A statement on the first page caught my attention: “...of [Google’s] 46,000 employees, just 2%—and just 1% of its technology workforce—are black.” Followed by: “In case you were wondering, blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population.” Comparing 1 or 2% of the Google workforce to 13% of the U.S. population felt dramatic, but incomplete. I det… [read more →]

I love this stunningly clear, easy-to-use, and information-rich interactive piece that encourages exploration of VC investments. It works well on many dimensions. Looks like it’s a collaboration between Accurat Studio, Ben Willers and Visual.ly, with all the data being drawn from the CrunchBase API, so it should stay as up to date as CrunchBase is. Some detail of the interaction: It’s much more interesting to play with it than read about it, so go take a look. [read more →]

I keep hearing about Density Design’s RAW tool and had it filed away in the back of my mind to try out sometime. As usual, necessity is the mother of actually doing something. So, I did something, and now I am a happy camper. What a great tool! I wanted to show a client how an alluvial diagram would do a good job of expressing some relationships in their data and was not thrilled at the prospect of trying to mock it up in Illustrator. In my search for an easier way, I stumbled across RAW again a… [read more →]