Hey folks, Are you interested in uping your data visualisation skills? I’m rolling out a new program to help you improve the design of your data visualizations. This program will last 5 weeks starting at the beginning of September. Each session will be two hours long and include a discussion of data visualization principles followed by an opportunity to apply these ideas to your own visualizations. There will be no coding in this program so you can focus more on concepts than implementation. I believe that once you understand the concepts, you can use any tool - even a pencil and piece of paper - to implement your design. Click this button to learn more.
In recent weeks there’s been a kerfuffle about data coming out of the government. Specifically the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revised its forecast of the number of jobs created in May and June 2025 by about 125,000 jobs per month. This led President Trump to fire the Chief of the BLS. Obviously, it’s critical to have trustworthy data from the government to understand the state of the economy, assess effectiveness of programs, and track the overall health of society. Political firings of people implementing SOPs is jarring. Beyond the politics, the NY Times again had a visualization that I found interesting. There are a few things in this figure that I found interesting and that I am curious to try out in R with First, this plot is a stacked bar chart. I really like the use of negative space for the number of jobs that were over projected in May and June. I’d start by making sure the data are in a tidy format with a column for the date (first of each month month and year between July 2024 and July 2025), a column for the number of jobs, and a column to indicate whether the number of jobs is from firm estimate or over projection. With this structure, we could use Second, I really liked the use of color. For the preceding months and years the firm numbers are in gray while the projected extra numbers are white. But for July 2025 the number is in orange. This would mean that we need three values in the indicator column. We could use Third, there’s a couple of instances of annotation in the plot. The first that catches my eyes is the italicized “REVISED DOWN” over the bars for May and June 2024. I’d likely do this with Finally, in classic New York Times fashion the y-axis labels are on top of the horizontal grid lines. It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I suspect I’d again use What do you think of this visualization? Did you notice anything that I’ve glossed over? How would you go about implementing that flourish?
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Hey folks! The summer is nearly over - where did it go?! Many of us are getting ready to send our kids off to school and start a new academic year. If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, I suspect you are interested in improving your data visualization skills. You can certainly continue to receive this newsletter and watch my weekly livestreams on YouTube for free to help increase those skills. If you want a more concentrated or personalized opportunity to develop your data visualization...
Hey folks! I’d love to have you join me in September for a new approach to teaching workshops that I will be rolling out. For five weeks I’ll be working with two cohorts of you all to improve our data visualization skills. Each week we’ll meet for a two-hour session. These sessions will include instruction on principles and concepts in data visualization and an opportunity to apply this information to visualizations we find in the wild or that you bring to the group. By not talking about...
Hey folks, I’m really excited to announce a new program to help you improve the design of your data visualizations. I emailed you about this earlier in the week, so I’ll keep this reminder brief. This data visualization makeover program will last 5 weeks starting at the beginning of September. Each two-hour session will include a discussion of data visualization principles and strategies followed by an opportunity to apply these ideas to your own visualizations. There will be no coding in...