This post is part of an exploratory series for a new project that will visualize data related to plants, botany, evolutionary history, and the coming of spring. Use the PlantVis tag to follow along. In the last post, I talked about getting back into the bloom calendar portion of the original project, after some trips…
Author: Erica
The Scale of Evolution
This post is part of an exploratory series for a new project that will visualize data related to plants, botany, evolutionary history, and the coming of spring. Use the PlantVis tag to follow along. As I was reading through Plant Families: A Guide for Gardeners and Botanists by Ross Bayton and Simon Maughan, I felt…
Understanding Plant Families
This post is part of an exploratory series for a new project that will visualize data related to plants, botany, evolutionary history, and the coming of spring. Use the PlantVis tag to follow along. The spring project is about learning as much as it is about data vis, so I’ve been reading several books about…
Exploring Phenophases
This post is part of an exploratory series for a new project that will visualize data related to plants, botany, evolutionary history, and the coming of spring. Use the PlantVis tag to follow along. One of the first datasets I found when I started this project was from the National Phenology Network. Phenology is the…
Hello to spring
This is the first in a series of posts about a new project in the works. It’s still too big and undefined to have a name, but the theme is visualizing data related to plants, botany, evolutionary history, and the coming of spring. Use the PlantVis tag to follow along. I’ve had a new project…
Why Can’t We Have More Fun?
Applying basic design principles, Part 8: Notes on novelty and task from a data vis killjoy This is part of a series of articles that illustrate how basic design principles can improve information display. The previous article reviewed chart choices for a dashboard redesign. Here, we’ll use an everyday example to step back a bit and…
Dashboard Redesign - A Look at Chart Choices
This article is part of a series that illustrates how basic design principles can improve information display. In the last installment, we thought through the purpose and context for a dashboard that we are redesigning. Up next, we will dive into revamping the content. Before we do that, it’s good to take a moment to…
Dashboard Redesign – Understanding Purpose
This article is part of a series that illustrates how basic design principles can improve information display. The previous installments focused on understanding the audience and context for your chart, and its core purpose. Here, we will take a look at how those considerations affect design decisions for the dashboard that we began redesigning in…
What’s your chart’s purpose?
In the last installment in this series, we looked at how knowing your audience can influence your chart design. Here, we’ll dig deeper into the chart as a method of communication, and how your own goals affect the best choice. Once you understand the audience and broader context for a visualization, it is time to…
Who is your chart for?
People often come to me wanting to know which visualization is the best one for their situation. Before you pick a chart type or visualization approach, it’s important to understand the context in which the chart will be used. The context for a visualization can be defined in many ways, but ultimately it comes down…