Your data design questions answered

Data visualisations and infographics have been making an impact in recent years, becoming more popular than ever. So, this is the best time to dive deep into the wonderful world of beautiful visual storytelling. To help you navigate through the graphics and numbers, we invited you, to question respected data visualization designer Stefanie Posavec.  

Some of the best questions from our Advocacy Assembly community have been selected.

Check out the Q&A below:

1. Can you suggest some tools to help me design data without knowing any developing or design skills?

Check out Visualisingdata.com’s ‘Resources’ section in the ‘Charting category’ : There are tons of options, both free and paid, that are a good starting point if you want to start visualising your data.

http://www.visualisingdata.com/resources/

 

2. I'm a graphic designer, how can I use data design more in my work?

Well first, you need to find a dataset, or find a client with a dataset! But the starting point would be to familiarise yourself with working with spreadsheets in a very basic way, sifting and ordering a dataset to help yourself make sense of it, and to discover patterns, thinking about how these patterns could be represented visually. Also, have a look at some of these great reference books as a starting point for understanding how to use data as a designer at visualisingdata.com (can you tell yet that I love this site? :) )

http://www.visualisingdata.com/references/

 

3. What is the inspiration behind your “Dear Data” project?

My collaborator Giorgia Lupi and I were both information designers who often worked by hand, using sketching as part of the process instead of using code (which is something that many data visualisation specialists use). We had only met twice when we started the project, and we wanted to get to know each other better, so we wanted to see if we could get to know each other better through the data we gathered, drew, and sent on a postcard over the Atlantic. And so a year-long project (and book) was born!

 

4. What's the future for comic drawings & dataviz? Can the two be interwoven to tell more complex stories? 

I think this could be an interesting accessible approach for communicating data, though I haven’t seen any examples of this. However there might be some amazing references out there! … Perhaps this is something this questioner should explore further themselves? I’d be interested to see the results!

To learn more about dataviz, why not take the course taught by Stefanie Posavec. Find out more here.