A harrowing tale I have to tell, my friends in data visualization. A tale for only the hardiest of heart, but a tale needs must be told. Look upon my dataflow and despair. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson back in 2016 but I truly hadn’t. Dear Reader, I am here to tell you, this is one lesson I heartily endorse for all of you. Heed my words. Do not follow me down these dark paths. This way lay madness; and I fell upon it, as it fell upon me. I have barely yet escaped to

Possibly as early as elementary school, but certainly by middle school, we’ve been introduced to the classic questions that journalists try to answer: who, what, where, when, how, and why. Colloquially known, inaccurately, as the Five Ws, these questions were the basis of how I was taught to write book reports, essays about current events, papers for history and social studies classes, and just about every other multi-paragraph assignment for the duration of my academic caree

It was nearing the end of Day One at Tableau Conference Europe, and she was inviting me to watch her Tips and Tricks session the following day. "I'll be showing three different tips," she said. "You've probably seen them before." "I don't know about that," I said. "There's lots of things I don't know how to do." "Well, one of them I know you'll know already," she insisted. "But you've probably heard the other ones too." Do you know the punchline already, dear readers? Of cou

Quick post here. Could probably be a tweet. But I was just messing around with some old data, testing out a different technique in Tableau that I think could be useful, and I ended up creating this: Now, I happen to think this is kind of beautiful. I would love to use it in a finished viz--or, even better, create an animation of it across another dimension and watch the mosaic pulse, and change, and flow over time. But it's meant to be a network diagram. Each node is listed

For humor (mostly), I have been known to join in the common refrain that no matter how creative and amazing and groundbreaking the dashboards are that you come up with, the customer will more often than not just want bar charts, line graphs, and crosstabs. ("We are so excited about Tableau! Now how can we use it to recreate these Excel charts we've been using for the last 15 years?") Recently I was able to spend a few hours developing some unorthodox interactives, which used

Has THIS ever HAPPENED to you? You have a nice three-pane Tableau line chart with multiple categories. It's a time-series. You want to adhere to (someone's version of) best design principles, so you choose to label each category on the right-hand end of the line. That's the most recent value, of course, and it's what you want to highlight. You've already made some design choices to help highlight one particular category. You made that label and that line larger than the oth

Before we get started, let me reassure you: this is neither a year in review, nor a "my goals for 2018" post. As a person who still feels a little awkward about being his own advocate (despite multiple social media presences as evidence to the contrary), and who openly expresses his fear of thinking out loud, I am reluctant to drag the public along on a tour of my personal points of pride from the last year, nor to let people in on my half-formed ambitions and ideas for the

Inherent in the idea of remixing or remaking someone's existing, original design--in any milieu--is the conceit that you believe that you have something to add to the discussion. Maybe you can improve the visual appeal; maybe you can clarify the message; maybe you can add another layer of meaning somehow; or maybe you can shepherd the original vision across communities to a new audience. What to do, then, when faced with a remix challenge like "Global Temperature Change," 201

You guys know the band James? Early 90s, UK band, most famous in the US for the song “Laid?” Well, I’ve had a different song of theirs in my head for awhile now. And now, inspired by that less-famous James tune, I’d like to share a few thoughts that, if you’re generous enough with your interpretations, pair nicely with the lyrics to “Say Something.” You're as tight as a hunter's trap Hidden well What are you concealing? I want to first say that I support the idea of writing a

That is the tempo. Are you old enough to know that the title of this post is a Beastie Boys lyric? (Are you old enough to know who the Beastie Boys are?) Of all the tracks from their multiplatinum, 13-song "Licensed to Ill" album, "Slow and Low" is...one of the least popular. Based on Spotify track plays, “Slow and Low” ranks 10th. From most to least: Fight For Your Right (to Party); No Sleep Til Brooklyn; Brass Monkey; Girls; Paul Revere; Rhymin & Stealin; She's Crafty; The

Practicing complicated or bespoke Tableau development techniques is valuable, even if it doesn't always translate to popular acclaim. There’s barely anything flashy about my submission for Makeover Monday this week, which was an analysis of adherence to various restrictive diets by people in five different regions of the world. The dashboard is in a 1000x1000 square canvas, my recent dimensions of choice. The top half of the viz leads off with a headline, followed by some tex

When I joined Northrop Grumman/TASC in 2001 as a web designer, my direct supervisor (“section manager” in company lingo), Jim, was a man in his 50s who made a lasting impression on me at my first performance review. During the session, he spent a lot of time asking me what I wanted to achieve in my career, near-term and long-term. He then gave me a long list of things that he advised me to do in order to achieve these things; all very specific, all very doable, and all of the

Greetings and salutations! Many of you are hard at work on your IronViz submissions, which is what I SHOULD be doing, but it’s haaaaaaaaard. And I don’t waaaaaaannnaaaa. In the meantime, let’s talk about a fun little trick that I used for this week’s Makeover Monday, one that has an extremely limited use case but is a fun little tool to have at your disposal. I’m talking about the rotated scatterplot. For some viz I worked on the past, I was underwhelmed by the quality of the

A gentle reminder: if you haven't looked at, or maybe even filled out, my survey about failure, I'd really appreciate it if you did. It only takes a few minutes and I'd love to get some different stories and perspectives for something I'm working on: https://t.co/p7Fim8ysB7 Aren't you darling? Just as sweet as peach pie in a cotton candy basket. Now let's get on with the show. Although I am not a child of the 90s, I nevertheless developed an incredible fondness for one partic

First, a request: if you haven't looked at, or maybe even filled out, my survey about failure, I'd really appreciate it if you did. It only takes a few minutes and I'd love to get some different stories and perspectives for something I'm working on: https://t.co/p7Fim8ysB7 Thank you. You are very nice and everybody says so. Now, on with the post. I have a challenge for you. If I asked you to design a Tableau dashboard in the style of Jonni Walker, could you do it? Actually, l

Back in the 1990s, I once was stuck on a plane out of Dallas with an extraordinarily memorable stranger. In the years since, I have usually referred to him, derisively, as “The Man’s Man,” in that he was the Hollywood stereotype of a brash, bullying salesman. Middle-aged, rumpled, sweaty, and several score pounds past his high-school-football-playing weight. He reminded me of the characters in the old recurring Saturday Night Live sketches about Bill Brasky. He collapsed into

(Charlie Hutcheson has written a fine technical review of my viz for this week as part of his Takeapart Tuesday series. I encourage you to read it, and all of his posts. For myself, I wanted to write about the “why” of this week’s viz, rather than the “what.”) I don’t presume to know what was inside the heads of the Andys when they started #MakeoverMonday in 2016, but I believe their intentions were largely to engage the critical thinking of the Tableau Public community, by h

This week's #MakeoverMonday was a re-imagining of a chart that Andy Kriebel did 10 years ago when he first started using Tableau. It was about comparing the rising cost of oil and of gold as commodities. The premise was they were somewhat, but not exactly, linked together in value. By building the chart, we wanted to see how this relationship changed over time, and whether the commodities were truly correlated. Early Returns The first few things that I saw when people started

(UPDATE April 22, 2017: A different technique for creating a viola chart, submitted by Ben Young (who is not on Twitter), has been added to the end of this post. It differs from my technique in that they are based on different means of creating Sankey-esque curves. My thanks to Ben for doing the work to figure out an alternate technique that could well be more practical in many circumstances.) One fine Makeover Monday found us working with some apparently Russian survey data.

Sometimes, paradoxically, the best results can be born out of pure laziness. This was the case for my most recent contribution to the epic Makeover Monday project, now in the 9th week of its second year. In Week 8 of 2017, the data set provided for remixing was “EU Potato Sector.” As inherently thrilling and intriguing as that data seemed, I was fully engaged with the Hacking Open Data project, which took up most of my vizzing time outside of work. After completing that, I ha