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Kelsey Nanan

A Decade Wrapped – Plotting Nostalgia for a Data Viz Gift

Need a great gift idea? Try making a personalized data viz for that special someone.

AI-generated image of a brown dog wearing a suit with sunglasses. The glasses have lenses that are shaded blue and red.
Eli Holder

Through a Partisan Lens: How Politics Overrides Information

A political psychology primer for information designers.

Timeline illustrating key events and the emotional evolution throughout my mentorship program, accompanied by the data visualizations I created during this period.
Victor Muñoz

Data Dreams Come True: My DVS Mentorship Experience

The DVS mentorship program was as much an emotional experience as it was an educational one. Here are key lessons I learned along the way.

A close-up image of symbols, like colored x's and o's on a series of lines each representing a day.
Heather Jones

The Siren Project: A Daily Account of Pandemic Sounds

Designer Heather Jones documented New York City’s sounds during the pandemic, then created a visualization that reads like a musical score.

Adrianna Janik

Visualizing Emotions with Color Cubes

Using two different data sets, I leveraged color and 3-D structure to visualize the complexity and breadth of human emotion.

Latest articles

Photo of a heron in water, catching fish with its beak.T
Christopher Laubenthal
November 29, 2023

This Analogy Explains How People Can Access Your Insights

Analogies can effectively explain complex topics in our field. The “fish in the pond" analogy shows ways to make insights more accessible.
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Kelsey Nanan
November 28, 2023

A Decade Wrapped – Plotting Nostalgia for a Data Viz Gift

Need a great gift idea? Try making a personalized data viz for that special someone.
The warming stripes of Poland, with colors on a gradient moving from blues to redsC
Monika Fratczak
November 21, 2023

Can Datavis Make Unpalatable Data More Enjoyable?

I studied emotional reactions to climate-related data visuals. Certain visuals evoked positive feelings—despite the unsettling topic.
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AI-generated image of a brown dog wearing a suit with sunglasses. The glasses have lenses that are shaded blue and red.T
Eli Holder
November 17, 2023

Through a Partisan Lens: How Politics Overrides Information

A political psychology primer for information designers.
Timeline illustrating key events and the emotional evolution throughout my mentorship program, accompanied by the data visualizations I created during this period.D
Victor Muñoz
November 16, 2023

Data Dreams Come True: My DVS Mentorship Experience

The DVS mentorship program was as much an emotional experience as it was an educational one. Here are key lessons I learned along the way.
A Midjourney image of people looking at a dashboard (made by Alex Kolokolov) on different devices and screens.F
Alex Kolokolov
November 14, 2023

From Big Screens to Paper Printouts: Adapting Your Dashboard for Different Formats

Will your dashboard be seen on a phone? In an auditorium? On a printout? Here are the best practices for eight possible dashboard formats.
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Brittany Rosenau
November 8, 2023

Data, Viz, + Design Delights — October

A curated collection of links from across the web in October 2023.
Cover of book of "Practical Charts" by Nicholas P. Desbarats.B
Jami Dennis
November 7, 2023

Book Review: “Practical Charts” by Nicholas P. Desbarats

Nick Desbarats’ new book, "Practical Charts," offers guidance making chart design choices based on the data you're working with.
In my final visualization, both candidates and both groups of voters are given a column dedicated to the emphasis they give to the thirteen key issues. Individual issues are connected across the chart by dark lines that change as the user hovers. At right, each issue is given its own caption that appears as its issue is hovered.H
Declan Bradley
November 1, 2023

How a DVS Mentorship Changed My Approach to Data Journalism

Over the course of the mentorship, I iterated on a data visualization project that bridged my two passions: data science and journalism.
A close-up image of symbols, like colored x's and o's on a series of lines each representing a day.T
Heather Jones
October 31, 2023

The Siren Project: A Daily Account of Pandemic Sounds

Designer Heather Jones documented New York City's sounds during the pandemic, then created a visualization that reads like a musical score.
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Adrianna Janik
October 26, 2023

Visualizing Emotions with Color Cubes

Using two different data sets, I leveraged color and 3-D structure to visualize the complexity and breadth of human emotion.
Book cover image for People and DataB
Joshua Pine
October 25, 2023

Book Review: “People and Data: Uniting to Transform Your Business”

Thomas C. Redman's book provides strategic advice to corporate leadership about how to engage all workers in the data process.
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
October 24, 2023

Step 7 in the Data Exploration Journey: Spin-Off Projects

With large projects, it's common to pursue spin-off ideas for the material that doesn't fit into the core project. Here are two examples.
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Nightingale Editors
October 18, 2023

Three Questions with… Poon Lee

Nightingale meets the data viz community! Today, we hear from information designer Poon Lee.
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Brittany Rosenau
October 16, 2023

Data, Viz, + Design Delights | September 2023

A curated collection of links from across the web.

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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..
Visitors test playing board gameW
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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..
On left is a textile with a typewritten phrase from the Book of Common Prayer: "FROM PESTILENCE FAMINE BATTLE MURDER AND FROM SUDDEN DEATH GOOD LORD FROM LIGHTNING AND TEMPEST, FROM PLAGUE DELIVER US." The phrase is overtyped 549 times on the textile surface and eventually obscures itself. On the right is the same textile, after washing.T
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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..
A series of white straight lines and squiggles on a black background.S
Romana Popocovski
October 12, 2023

Starting From Visualisation: Lines and Squiggles That Lead to a Nobel Prize

How one man's unconventional thinking and use of simple visuals transformed the way physicists were tackling quantum interactions.
A dashboard with a big red "Redesign" stamp over it. A cartoonish crown hangs on the dashboard's top right corner.H
Alex Kolokolov
October 11, 2023

How I Took Off My Dashboard Crown and Admitted My Mistakes

An intern ripped apart a dashboard that I had considered a model of good design. I chose to swallow my pride and learn from the experience.
Data visualization represents a week of moods. Each donut symbolizes a factor contributing to my emotional highs and lows. The cinnamon donuts below the weekday labels signify negative emotions, while the glazed donuts above indicate positive emotions.C
Xindeling Pan
October 10, 2023

Capturing Life’s Ups and Downs in Data Mood Journals

Drawing my personal moods and emotions pushes me to think out of the box, exploring creative ways to represent them visually.
Pages of the New York Times with maps of the United States filled with dots of varying densities. Some maps have county lines, others have state lines.C
TK Sajeev Kumar
October 5, 2023

Capturing One Million Deaths on a Page: A Chat with NYT’s Carrie Mifsud

Carrie Mifsud of "The New York Times" talks about her award-winning front (and back) page design to commemorate one million COVID deaths.
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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.
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
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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
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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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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
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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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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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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
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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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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
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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
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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
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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.<
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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
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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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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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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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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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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.

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...
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
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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
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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!