Data Viz Today

I walk you through my process for creating a data viz brief and how to use it! If you're interested in a short training and getting a copy of the data viz brief template that I use with my clients, shoot me an email with the subject line "INTERESTED!" and if there's enough interest, I'll host a live training! hello@allitorban.com

When you're kicking off a data viz project, do you have a series of questions that you ask to uncover the goals, audience, and data? Want to know how to kick it up a notch? I know I do! Recently, I had the pleasure of working with Liz Hatherley, whose whole expertise is wrapped up in pulling this kind of information out of her clients, which has led to incredibly smooth dataviz projects! In this episode, Liz shares more about what kinds of questions she's asking in her discovery workshops and how we, as data viz designers, can start integrating more strategic thinking into our own workflows. Let's go! Show notes: https://dataviztoday.com/shownotes/72

Join the Elevate Membership Program! I invited a few of the best dataviz designers and freelancers I know on the show today (Duncan Geere, Gabrielle Merite, and Will Chase) and we absolutely stuffed the hour with as many dataviz freelancing tips as we possibly could! In this episode, we demystify the whole process: starting from when someone emails you that they're interested in your work, what you should write back, what you should ask in the discovery call, basics to include in your contract, tips on how to price your work, tools we use to prototype our visualizations, how to present your work to your client, navigating through feedback rounds, and more! I told you this episode is packed!! Let's go… Show notes: https://dataviztoday.com/shownotes/71

Today I'm calling out the biggest things I learned in the past year. There's just something about naming it that helps me remember to keep doing it in the new year and even how I can take it up a notch in the next year. In this episode, I'll highlight the three biggest lessons I learned this year, and they all stem from better communication with clients, ourselves, and with our colleagues. Let's get to it! Show notes: https://dataviztoday.com/shownotes/70 Elevate Membership waitlist: https://forms.gle/wBDXYYm3rEawY3pPA

Have you ever reimagined your tabular data set as a network and discovered new insights? Networks are an obvious choice if you're visualizing someone's social network, for example, but there are so many more possibilities! In this episode, Dr. Keita Broadwater will explain what a network is, share a couple of examples of tabular data reimagined as a network, and give us a few tips on when a data set might be ripe for this kind of analysis.

How do we future-proof our data viz careers? What skills are important now and 10 years from now as software companies come and go and $5 dashboards pop up on Fiverr? In this episode, Dr. Jonathan Schwabish and I talk about what our consultant work looks like right now and how we're working to future-proof our careers. This is a joint podcast between Data Viz Today and PolicyViz so we'll both be asking questions. Let's go! https://dataviztoday.com/shownotes/68

Have you written off 3D as a big no-no? Not yet! In this episode, Dr. Tyler Morgan-Wall shares his latest innovations and impactful use cases of his Rayshader package in R. Take a listen and be amazed at the samples in the show notes! (you can use Rayshader and R for free!) https://dataviztoday.com/shownotes/67

Have you heard of data sonification? It's the process of turning data into sound, and there's a novel podcast out now called Loud Numbers where Duncan Geere and Miriam Quick introduce a data story, explain how they sonified it, and then play the sonification they've created. In this episode, we discover how they created their podcast, what's the benefit of turning data into sound, and how we can make our own sonifications without sounding like complete amateurs! Show notes: https://dataviztoday.com/shownotes/66

It's easy to think you have to be the master at D3 and also have the design eye of an artist in order to have a fulfilling data viz career, but that has not been my experience, nor the experience of my guest today Amanda Makulec who is the Data Visualization Society's Executive Director. She's heard her fair share of data viz origin stories, frustrations, and career pro tips, so I asked her to come on the show and share with us her golden advice on navigating a data viz career (spoiler alert: you don't need to be a unicorn!). Show notes: https://dataviztoday.com/shownotes/65

How can you take a dense, technical report and turn it into something people will actually read? In this episode, Ann K. Emery shares the top tips that she recommends to her clients that have been bringing reports to life for years! Show notes: https://dataviztoday.com/shownotes/64