Data Visualization

I found Data Visualization to be a very interesting and enriching course. Before even taking this course, I was introduced the field of Data Visualization during my internship. During that time, I was working on various other projects, but I was assigned as a tester for the company using the Data Visualization tool Tableau. While I had a taste of it then, I was only slightly intrigued, but that changed when I took a Data Visualization course the following semester. Through this course I understood the importance of telling stories with data, and how to guide a story alongside data so as to inform the reader while not overwhelming them.

I found this project to be particularly interesting because unlike the other two projects where the data and the story were more displayed at the same time, this project required the designer to create the story with the data and story together. This was definitely a harder challenge then writing the data stories. This is because on top of researching and figuring out what information needed to be displayed, as a designer you also need to choose the best possible layout for your text and designs/images. Looking back at it now, there are only a few minor tweaks I would have like to have made, but these were acceptable mistakes considering I used Canva to make this (which doesn’t allow the same freedom as InDesign).

Two of the main projects in this course were focused around Data Stories. A Data Story is when you take different forms of data, and give the data a “voice” through telling a story. At first, this was an incredibly hard concept for me to understand. I could sit and stare at a graph and understand it but when asked to create a story connecting the two pieces of data, I would get confused. So, instead of searching for data and trying to write about it, I switched tactics and decided to start with my idea. To start both my stories, I created a sort of thesis, that could serve as the overarching story that connects all the data charts on the page. After creating this beginning, I would move from chart to chart, giving a explanation besides each one so the reader get a better understanding of all the provided information while not being overloaded with data.