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Arlene Birt

The Future of the Creative Process Is Increased Collaboration

More than 60 scientists and I co-designed data visualizations for a major climate report. Here are key lessons from that experience.

Line chart elements on the dashboard resemble pasta sticks on a plate. Delicious!
Alex Kolokolov

When Charts Looks Like Spaghetti, Try These Saucy Solutions

Tangled heaps of lines and numbers are a recipe for disaster. Here’s how to make a dashboard with more visually appetizing charts.

Animated stacked triangle visualization showing the goal progress of a water polo match
Krisztina Szucs

How to Create Animated Stacked Triangle Charts Without Code

With Plot Parade you can make a stacked triangle chart without code. The tool can also turn the chart into a GIF animation. Here’s how.

Nick Desbarats

Connected Scatterplots Make Me Feel Dumb

Connected scatterplots are often used to show the relation between two variables over time. Why use them when there are better alternatives?

Kelsey Nanan

The Best Day… To Buy a Taylor Swift Ticket

A Taylor Swift fan with little hope of buying a concert ticket used her coding and data viz skills to make her Wildest Dreams come true.

Latest articles

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Claudia Berger & Chris Alen Sula
October 3, 2023

Crafting Connections: Lessons from Installing a Data Physicalization

The challenges and successes of making a physical data visualization, from initial conceptualization through installation.
Photograph of "Electricity generated or demanded in Manchester, 1951–1954." This type of visualization is known as a "load model", which represents power consumption in three dimensions. Each day is represented as a piece of cardboard, with the top edge of the cardboard cut away to form a column chart with the height of each column representing electricity demand over 30 minutes. The daily cards are stacked tightly together, so the tops create a 3-dimensional surface that indicates power usage over several years.T
Robert Simmon
September 28, 2023

The Power Behind Physical, 3-D Visualizations

How 3-D representations offer a quicker and deeper understanding of our world than symbols or abstractions in 2-D visualizations.
Two images side by side, depicting the same event: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban meeting with Pope Francis. The left image showing the actual meeting, while the right image is a depiction generated by Midjourney AI.M
Krisztián Szabó
September 26, 2023

Making “The Pope on the Road,” an AI-Driven Interactive Site

Using ChatGPT and AI-generated images to build a scrollytelling story about Pope Francis's visit to Hungary.
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Hyper-realistic AI-generated image depicting a people's eyes gazing intently at intricate graphs and data, blending human and technological perspectives.M
Erdni Okonov
September 21, 2023

Making Dashboards Optimal for Human Brain Processing

How the science behind brain processing and active memory can help guide our dashboard and other data visual designs.
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Kim Albrecht
September 19, 2023

Visualizing ChatGPT’s Worldview

Using prompting and data visualization to make sense of Machine Learning systems.
Book cover of Drawing Data With Kids, showing a father doing art with a young girl in a green headscarfR
Joseph Mackereth
September 18, 2023

Review: Drawing Data with Kids

The book "Drawing Data with Kids" makes data visualization accessible, low-tech, and something the whole family can do—no screens required.
A conceptual image of a hammer overlayed with a series of trendlines all spiking up and shooting down. On top of the lines are a bunch of speech bubbles that all say "data storytelling!"H
Amanda Makulec
September 15, 2023

Has Data Storytelling Reached Its Peak?

"Data storytelling" has become an overhyped, catch-all term. Here’s how to align data storytelling expectations with colleagues and clients.
A simple sketch with 3D columns, 3 red and 4 black, grouped loosely together with some in front of others.S
Will Stahl-Timmins & Nadieh Bremer
September 13, 2023

Showing Human Stories Behind Data Points

Will Stahl-Timmins was struggling to visualize groups of people in a humanizing way. Then he heard Nadieh Bremer's tips on data aggregation.
A close-up of the network diagram.D
Milán Janosov
September 12, 2023

Decoding the Manhattan Project’s Network: Unveiling Science, Collaboration, and Human Legacy

A data viz that unveils the science and human legacy of the Manhattan Project, one of the largest ever scientific collaborations.
Line chart elements on the dashboard resemble pasta sticks on a plate. Delicious!W
Alex Kolokolov
September 7, 2023

When Charts Looks Like Spaghetti, Try These Saucy Solutions

Tangled heaps of lines and numbers are a recipe for disaster. Here's how to make a dashboard with more visually appetizing charts.
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Arlene Birt
September 6, 2023

The Future of the Creative Process Is Increased Collaboration

More than 60 scientists and I co-designed data visualizations for a major climate report. Here are key lessons from that experience.
Animated stacked triangle visualization showing the goal progress of a water polo matchH
Krisztina Szucs
September 5, 2023

How to Create Animated Stacked Triangle Charts Without Code

With Plot Parade you can make a stacked triangle chart without code. The tool can also turn the chart into a GIF animation. Here's how.
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Julia Büchting
August 30, 2023

Conquering Self Doubt After a Career Change

My transition from art to business analytics wasn't easy. Here's how I managed the transition and thrived.
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Nick Desbarats
August 29, 2023

Connected Scatterplots Make Me Feel Dumb

Connected scatterplots are often used to show the relation between two variables over time. Why use them when there are better alternatives?
A group of students outside sitting around a table looking at smartphones.A
Elsa Richard
August 24, 2023

A Crowdsourced Geodata Project Is Aiding Education Efforts in Tanzania 

A geodata project helped diagnose problems with education access in Tanzania, allowing education stakeholders to devise solutions to boost school attendance.

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Some of our favorite articles:

“A Noxious Problem” by Federica FragapaneW
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What Makes A Data Visualisation Elegant?

On a dedicated channel, #dvs-topics-in-data-viz, in the Data Visualization Society Slack, our members discuss questions and issues pertinent to the field of data visualization. Discussion..
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Asterisk Nation: One Tribe’s Challenge to Find Data About its Population

The Yurok Tribe in far northern California needs to address a condition plaguing numerous rural communities in the United States: addiction and substance misuse. Across..
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Six Ways to Bring Empathy into your Data

One of the big challenges in visualizing data, and quantitative research in general, is helping readers connect with the content. Connecting directly with people and..
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Visualizing Small Victories

Everyone loves a trophy! Okay, it’s not that simple. Still, we humans love to mark milestones and accomplishments. Trophies are tangible reminders of those fleeting moments of victory...
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Indelible Impressions: Why You Won’t Forget the Map Room Project

In my quest to improve data fluency among those who think of themselves as non-data people, I am always on the lookout for physical manifestations..
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What Board Games Teach Us About Data Visualization

Recently I visited the biggest trade fair for board games in the world. The Internationale Spieltage (Spiel) takes place annually in my current hometown of Essen in..
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The Soul of Data: Data Physicalizations on Fabric

When my area went into lockdown in March of 2020, initial case counts were relatively low in my state, even as the coasts were plunged into..
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Did Data Visualization Erase the Woman from Women’s Work?

As the world changed over the past two years, more and more of my friends took to handcrafts like quilting and knitting as a counterbalance..

Spotlight on community:

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Agnes Vilia, Aquila Adimurti, Regina Nurashari & Arran Ridley
August 3, 2023

Teaching Data Visualisation to Middle Schoolers in Jakarta

The class allowed students to see data as not just a result of gathering facts from the world, but as a tool to make meaning of reality.
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Taylor Johnston
August 1, 2023

What a Data Viz Mentor—And The Data Viz Community—Taught Me About Accessibility

My experience with the DVS Mentorship Program gave me technical and practical skills to carry forward.
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Dario Rodighiero & University of Groningen Students
July 25, 2023

Exploring the Data Visualization Landscape: S-H-O-W 2023 Conference Highlights

The S-H-O-W conference instilled a vision for growth and impact of data visualization. Here are some key takeaways from student attendees.
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India Johnson & Nightingale Editors
June 21, 2023

Dear Nightingale: Raveling Data

Can you transform a piece of fabric into a data viz by unraveling it? In this challenge, feel free to cut, pick, and pull meaning out of a textile.

Celebrating the dataviz of W.E.B. Du Bois:

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W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 (Part 1)

One of the most powerful examples of data visualization was made 118 years ago by an all-black team led by W.E.B. Du Bois only 37..
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Data Journalism in the study of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Negro Problem” (Part 2)

One of the most powerful examples of data visualization was made 118 years ago by an all-black team led by W.E.B. Du Bois only 37..
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Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations (Part 3)

One of the most powerful examples of data visualization was made 118 years ago by an all-black team led by W.E.B. Du Bois only 37..
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Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original W.E.B. Du Bois Data Visualization (Part 4)

An all-black team led by W.E.B. Du Bois made one of the most powerful examples of data visualization 118 years ago, only 37 years after..
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The Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Exhibit of American Negroes” (Part 5)

An all-black team led by W.E.B. Du Bois made one of the most powerful examples of data visualization 118 years ago, only 37 years after..
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Discovering an Unknown Chart from W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Exhibition of American Negroes” (Part 6)

Activist and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois created “The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris in collaboration with Booker T. Washington, prominent black..
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Nightingale Editors
August 22, 2023

Career Paths in Data Visualization

Portraits of different career areas, and profiles of people who work in data visualization.
The Double Diamond design model has four stages: Ideate, Focus, Build/Produce and Delivery. In the double diamond, there's an arrow pointing to the very center of the two diamonds, which is right between Focus and Build. The callout text explains that this is where you plan for what to do and how to tackle (at least some of) it.S
Erica Gunn
August 21, 2023

Step 6 in the Data Exploration Journey: Cut to Realistic Scope

A project to find insights from DVS's State of the Industry Survey data moves from the analysis stages to preparation for build out.
A bubble chart of migrants, where the each bubble is colored by place of origin and the size of the bubble is the number of migrants.B
Soha Elghany
August 17, 2023

Beyond Numbers: How Ethical Data Visualization Tells the Human Story

If you fail to show the human behind the data, you risk telling an incomplete and misleading tale, devoid of crucial information.
Cover of Jordan Morrow's "Be Data Analytical: How to Use Analytics to Turn Data into Value"A
Joshua Pine
August 16, 2023

An Interview with Jordan Morrow, Author of “Be Data Analytical”

In his latest book, Morrow explores how data can influence decision making. Here's a peek at what's inside—plus, a Q&A with the author.
Creating a visual representation of my first 12 nights, drawing inspiration from Piet Mondrian's art style.<
Or Misgav
August 15, 2023

Finding Solace in Tracking My First Trimester Nights

Through sleepless nights and overwhelming fatigue, I used data and art to discover my strength—and the beauty of resilience.
Photo of Charles Apple at his desk, holding a printed infographic about the U.S. midterm elections.I
TK Sajeev Kumar
August 10, 2023

Infographics Journalist Charles Apple on Making Effective Charts

Charles Apple, the "Further Review" page editor of The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington, talks about graphics reporting.
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Kelsey Nanan
August 8, 2023

The Best Day… To Buy a Taylor Swift Ticket

A Taylor Swift fan with little hope of buying a concert ticket used her coding and data viz skills to make her Wildest Dreams come true.
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Theresa-Marie Rhyne
August 7, 2023

The Generative AI Blues: Choosing Data Color Schemes with Adobe’s Firefly

Follow these steps to explore color choices with Adobe Firefly, a creative generative AI model. Plus: the color theory behind the process.
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Matthew Mason & Massimiliano Belli
August 2, 2023

Step Aside Line Graphs And Bar Charts! This Is a Job For Me.

If line charts and bar charts don't quite fit the data, step charts can be a great alternative. Here's a primer on when—and how to—use them.
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Prasanta Kumar Dutta
July 27, 2023

Visualising the Spread of a Hypothetical Pandemic

Creating animated globe visuals required months of exploring data, playing with D3, leveraging several graphics tools—and a few clever hacks.
The front cover of Maarten Boers’s Data Visualization for Biomedical Scientists: Creating Tables and Graphs That Work, featuring a data visualization entitled “First wave covid-19” by Gert Jan Kocken which abstractly portrays data from the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.R
Emilia Ruzicka
July 26, 2023

Review: Data Visualization for Biomedical Scientists by Maarten Boers

Author Maarten Boers teaches how to improve visualizations with before-and-after examples, and suggests a better way to show error on charts.
Vegetables labeled as materials we use in class like "academic papers" and "podcasts"T
Amy Cesal & Amanda Makulec
July 20, 2023

Teaching the Foundations of Data Visualization 

Thinking about teaching data viz? DVS co-founders Amy Cesal and Amanda Makulec share their thoughts on developing an overview class.
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Querying the Quantification of the Queer: A New Data Structure for Gender Spectra

As long as binary designations continue to be used, queer individuals will be misrepresented. Here's a redesigned gender data structure.
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A New Vision for Data Viz Accessibility

As the data viz industry becomes more aware of the barriers it creates for blind and visually impaired people, things are starting to change.
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Nightingale Is Turning Four! Here’s Why We’re Celebrating

Break out the champagne because Nightingale is celebrating our fourth birthday on July 15th! Here are some of our highlights from the past year.
Grid showing dozens of screens from the Economist Impact data design system slide deck. Charts are not legible but are shown as small thumbnails, largely using shades of reds and blues to match the bright red of the Economist Impact logo.C
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Creating a Design System to Prevent Problematic Colour Pairings

The data design system at Economist Impact needed to ensure charts were clear, insightful, and accessible—which led to a new colour tool. 
A image with black and white headshots of Jaime Tanner and Johny Cassidy.M
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Making Visual Accessibility Part of Your Data Viz Practice

Data journalists Jaime Tanner and Johny Cassidy chat about the milestones and challenges they see in making data viz visually accessible.
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Data Is Plural Visualization Challenge: Project Dialogism Novel Corpus

Ready to dig into a good book? This iteration of the Data Is Plural Visualization Challenge features the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus.
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More than “It Depends”: Behind the scenes on Nightingale magazine issue 3, Guidelines

How did our data viz "Guidelines" issue turn out? Our editors and Creative Director debrief on the behind-the-scenes!
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Looking East: Kontinentalist’s Design Principles Enhance the Asian Narrative

At Kontinentalist, strong guidelines empower designers to be adaptive, flexible, and responsive while remaining true to core values.
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Marcelo Duhalde’s Graphics Bring Journalistic Investigations to Life

From plane crashes to coffin houses, Marcelo Duhalde uses infographics to explore and explain stories for the South China Morning Post.
An image of a phone, open to a mock "Tinder" conversation that says "Hey I think your hot," and a response of, "Ew." The bottom of the screen says "This user has been blocked from viewing your profile.W
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Worth the Right Swipe? Using Data to Find Love on Dating Apps

Curious about online dating life but hesitant to try out the apps, a love-seeker visualizes dating data to boost chances of success.
A highly complex graphic where the x-axis is population density (people per km^2) and the y-axis is energy consumption per person (kWh/d/p) Both axis are onlog scales. The countries are shown as colored bubbles that are sized according to land area. Diagonal lines show power consumption per unit of area.D
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Defying Chart Design Rules for Clearer Data Insights

Sir David MacKay, a UK scientist, challenged conventional chart design and created a truly insightful data visualization about sustainable energy.
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A Call to Women in Data Viz: Be a Techmakers Ambassador

After attending two conferences in May—DVS's Outlier and Google's I/O—Jiwon Kim reflects on how women can become more visible in tech fields.
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Weaving Data Viz Into Science and Engineering Education

A Penn State course introduced STEM students to data visualization, teaching them design fundamentals and how to be supportive practitioners.
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Data Visualization: A Subjective Lens on Reality

An analysis of three elements that influence data visualization  and that render the underlying data to be more subjective than objective.
A photo of the wall straight-on, with a sign that says "The National COVID Memorial Wall."T
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Taking Time Is an Effective Way To Process Large Numbers

A striking memorial to the victims of COVID-19 in the UK reveals a neglected temporal dimension of data visualisation.

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Who’s on the Map? Using Data to Reimagine Street Name Diversity

In 145,933 streets in 30 major European cities and 17 different countries, our team explores who is included and who is excluded in our toponymy.
Cover of the Book "Friends Beyond Measure" featuring an illustration of two children sitting on a stack of multi-colored bars. One of the children is drawing dots on the wall behind them.L
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Lalena Fisher: Telling A Children’s Story With Infographics

An interview with children's author Lalena Fisher, whose latest book introduces kids to charts and diagrams that tell a story of friendship.

Dataviz Horror Stories

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Dataviz Horror Stories: Shirley Wu

Have you ever made an embarrassing mistake in a data visualization? Did you utterly fail to meet your client’s or boss’s vision? Did you proudly..
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Histórias Aterradoras em Visualização de Dados: Jorge Camões

Read this article in English here. Alguma vez cometeu um erro constrangedor numa visualização de dados? Passou por completo ao lado da visão do cliente..
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Dataviz Horror Stories: Jon Schwabish

Jon Schwabish, co-author with Alice Feng of the “Do No Harm” guide, tells his children five things: Be honest Be kind Be respectful Be hard..
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Dataviz Horror Story: How I Crashed the Top Exec’s Email

Have you ever made an embarrassing mistake in a data visualization? Did you utterly fail to meet your client’s or boss’s vision? Did you proudly..
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Dataviz Horror Story: Miriam Quick

Have you ever made an embarrassing mistake in a data visualization? Did you utterly fail to meet your client’s or boss’s vision? Did you proudly..
Illustration of a tombstone with a line chart dropping precipitously, with the letters WIP aboveD
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Dataviz Horror Story: Jacque Schrag

We’ve all made embarrassing dataviz mistakes, whether we’re beginners or superstars. This series of Horror Stories aims to normalize “failure” as part of professional development...
yellow map showing the tour de france, but our of beer glass iconsB
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Building a Tour de France Beer Map With GPT-4: A Non-Developer’s Perspective

As a non-developer, it was challenging using GPT-4 to build a data visualization. Here are my lessons learned about working with the AI tool.
Data visualisation self-portrait. An abstract painting created by Thabata from Data Rocks, using graphite, ink and watercolours.I
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Is It Data? Is It Art? It’s a Data Self-Portrait!

To step away from the constraints of her day job, a data vis practitioner made an introspective art piece with tools she hadn't used before.
A photo of the Outlier presentation stage in Porto, with a projector screen three chairs, a podium and an physical "Outlier" letter blocks set on the floor.O
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Outlier 2023: Changing the World, One Chart at a Time

DVS's 2023 Outlier Conference was held in Porto, Portugal, and virtually in early May. Here's what a few attendees say about the experience.
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Hachette v. Internet Archive and the Future of Data Access

A legal ruling raises issues about fair use in storing knowledge, the role of digital libraries, and balancing copyrights with open access.
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Data Storytelling Is Empowering Female Journalists in Kenya

A fellowship program is teaching Kenyan journalists to use data sources and data analysis to do investigative work. Here are three examples.
A view of the final dashboard. At the top are the filter buttons to select countries by characteristics (region or income) and a shuffle button that randomized the selection for you. Below that is the radial diagram and to its right is a dot plot, allowing for a deeper dive into the metric.F
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Finding The Right Elements For an Award-Winning Dashboard

Lindsey Poulter won the World Data Viz Prize using a mix of dashboard features—including a shuffle button to randomize the view.
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The Making of “The Growing Influence of the Warming Stripes”

Chesca Kirkland shows the process behind her visualisation—from Nightingale Issue 2—that explores the growing influence of the Warming Stripes.
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Nightingale Issue #3: FAQ on Shipping and Subscriptions

A lot has changed at Nightingale, so here's an update to our FAQ. There are a lot of new ideas in here, so please let us know what you think!
Cohabitation network (a collection of circled nodes connected by lines) where each node is a mammal. There are 5,286 nodes and 62,385 edges colored by the continent of the animal's primary habitat. The colors are shades of browns, blues and grays. The nodes are more clustered by color here than in the country-level network.U
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Using Color to Interpret a Complex Network of Threatened Species

In a busy network diagram of threatened land mammals, different color treatments show how the animals' habitats are geographically connected.