Data Visualisation Resources

A curated list of resources for your learning journey.

This is a long-list of articles, talks, slidedecks, mini-websites related to data visualisations. They are structured around the topics I cover in my long-form data visualisation courses.

Learning & Craft

• Amit Kapoor: Learning the Craft of Data Visualisation — My perspective and approach on learning data visualisation. For an audio version - here is a 20 min podcast with a brief intro of my journey and my thoughts on learning.

• Nadieh Bremer: Learning Data Visualization — Tips on improving your skills and career in data visualisation.

Purpose & Value

• Amit Kapoor: Purpose & Value — Overview slides on purpose, value and medium of data visualisation.

• Ben Fry: The Four Cs of Data-Design — A master practitioner’s lens at design and data: Communicate, Consider, Condense and Conceive.

• Giorgia Lupi: Data Humanism - A Visual Manifesto — A humanist perspective on data visualisation embracing complexity, subjectivity, sketching, inspiration and much more.

• Scott Berinato: Visualisations that Really Work — A practical & business focussed perspective on visualisation looking at four different use cases: idea illustration, idea generation, visual discovery & visual explanations.

• Lisa Charlotte: Why do we Visualise Data? — Looking at the three main goals of data visualisation: Attention & Beauty, Understanding and Implications.

Grammar & Flow

• Amit Kapoor: Interactive Data Visualisation — A mini-site illustrating the multiple layers of data visualisation: Data, Visual (& Composition), Annotation and Interaction.

• Hadley Wickham: A Layered Grammar of Graphics — A short paper succintly describing the grammar of graphics as a tool that enables us to concisely describe the components of a graphic.

• Tamara Munzner: Visualisation Analysis & Design — The summary slides from the book covering a structured approach to navigating the design space of visualisation.

Process & Tools

• Amit Kapoor: Process & Tools — Overview slides on the process of data visualisation and tools landscape for creating them.

• Data Driven Storytelling: From Analysis to Communication — A synthesis and compilation of the process and tools used by various practitioner’s for the creation of data stories (Chapter 7 in the Book).

• Pudding.cool: Continue, Pivot or Put-it-down — An article detailing Pudding’s process to go from idea to their long-form interactive data story. Look out for how many “Put-it-down” are there in the process of data stories.

• Lisa Charlotte: One Chart, Multiple Tools — Creating the same chart in multiple tools to understand the strength and weakness of different tools.

• Krist Wongsuphasawat: Navigating the Wide World of Data Visualization Libraries — Overview of different abstractions and choice of data visualisation libraries for making stuff on the web.

Wrangle & Explore

• Amit Kapoor: Wrangle & Explore — Overview slides on data wrangling and exploration.

• Hadley Wickham: Tidy Data — The essential of converting the data in to a tidy format to support analysis and visualisation.

• Quartz: A Guide to Bad Data — An exhaustive reference to problems seen in real-world data along with suggestions on how to resolve them.

• Jeffrey Heer: Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis — Visual Analytics as a knowledge process of data sensemaking and insight generation.

Questions & Encoding

• Amit Kapoor: Visualising Multidimensional Data — A talk walking through the exploration of multi-dimensional data visualisation design space. Video link

• Amit Kapoor: Questions & Encoding — Overview slides on grammar-based and question-based approach to visual encoding.

• Financial Times: Visual Vocabulary — A excellent starter guide on the type of questions and choice of data visualisation.

• From Data to Viz — A mini-site on data visualisation chart selection based on the type of data columns.

• Andy Kirk: Chartmaker— A mini-site with links and references on how to make basic visualisation in a large selection of data visualisation tool

• Accurat: Sketching with Data Open’s the Mind Eye — An article explaining how sketching can help in the process of creation new forms of data visualisation.

Perception & Decoding

• Amit Kapoor: Perception & Decoding — Overview slides on effectiveness to visual decoding at the micro & macro-level.

• Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg: Design & Redesign in Data Visualisation — A thoughtful take on data visualisation critique through the lens of redesign.

• Elijah Meek: Data Visualisation - Fast and Slow — A series of article exploring meta perception topics on charts with what chart say, what charts mean and what charts do.

• Kaiser Fung: The Trifecta Checkup — Looking at the Question, the Data & the Visual to evaulate if the visualisation is working or not.

Color & Scales

• Amit Kapoor: Color — Overview slides on choosing color for data visualisation.

• Lisa Charlotte: Friendly Guide to Color in Data Visualisation — An overview of color tools and how to go about color selection for data visualisation.

• Data Wrapper: How to pick Beautiful Colors — Common color mistakes and how to avoid them.

• Amy Cesal: Data Visualisation Design Systems — Examples and guidelines for building the data visualisation style guide as part of a larger design system.

Composition & High Density

• Accurat: Architecture of a Data Visualisation — A multi-layered & composition focussed approach for Static Visualisation

• Maarten Lambrechts: Xenographics — A collections of unusual representations and maps, which are novel, innovative and experimental.

Text, Geo-Spatial & Networks

• Heer, Bostock & Ogievetsky: A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo — An article showcasing the usage of more complex techniques for visualizing and interacting with diverse data sets.

• Richard Brath: Visualising with Text — Pushing the possibilities of text visualisation with extended grammar and non-traditional representation.

Messaging & Annotation

• Susie Lu: Annotation Design and Modes— The closest to a grammar of annotation and its implementation as a javascript library.

• Samuel Parsons: Typography in Data Visualisation — Macro & Micro considerations for applying typography in the context of visualisation.

• Samantha Zhang: Data Visualisation Fonts — Fonts consideration for data visualisation.

Structure & Attention

• Amit Kapoor: Dashboard & Structure — Overview slides on dashboard and structurin attention

• Ben Schneiderman: The Eyes Have it — The seminal paper that introduced the information seeking mantra: “Overview First, Zoom and Filter, then Details-on-Demand”.

• Susie Lu: Abstraction - Data Points & Data Derivatives: Helping the audience to navigate between individual data-points and data-agrregates by choosing the right abstractions.

• Juice Analytics: A Guide to Creating Dashboards People love

Storytelling & Narrative

• Amit Kapoor: Crafting Visual Stories with Data — My talk on principles from storytelling adapted to data-visualisation context. Video version

• NAPA Cards: Narrative Patterns for Data-Driven Storytelling — An example driven site categorising exemplars of narrative patterns.

• Segal & Heer: Narrative Visualisation – Telling Stories with Data — A “Test-of-Time” IEEE Vis paper exploring the patterns in narrative visualisation.

• Gavin McMahon: Story Structure – the hidden framework that hangs your story together — Summary insight on story structure and example types from presentation, movies, art, business

• Jonathan Corum: Storytelling with Data — A data-journalist’s perspective and examples on creating stories.

Interactive & Reactive

• Amit Kapoor: Interaction — Overview slides on interaction principles and its application.

• Arvind Satyanarayan: Interaction Patterns — A look through the grammar of interaction and patterns in the interative visualisation zoo.

• Bret Victor: Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction — A systematic approach to creating interactive visualisation by thinking about the levels of abstraction in the system and moving through them in the design.

• Dominikus Bauer: The Superpower of Interactive Graphics — A look at how interactive visualisation can help navigate between Macro views (aggregate data points) and Micro Views (individual data points)

• Gregor Aisch: In Defence of Interactive Graphics & Dominikus Bauer: The End of Interactive Visualisation: A thoughtful discussion on balancing the usage of interaction in your design.

• Distill: Communicating with Interactive Articles — Examining the design of interactive articles by synthesizing theory from disciplines such as education, journalism, and visualization.

Animation & Context

• Amit Kapoor: Motion & Animation — Overview slides on motion as visual encoding and using animation.

• Jon Schwabish: Observation on Animation in Data Visualisation

• Nadieh Bremer: Techniques for Data Visualization on both Mobile & Desktop - Tips on making a data visualization that look good and is effective on both mobile and desktop.

• Adobe: Designing Responsive Visualisation — A look at the trade-offs in designing visualisation for multiple context and the design designs involved in it.

Vis Challenges & Data Products

• Jeffrey Heer: Visualisation is not Enough — Why visualisation is not a standalone activity and pushes us to think about the role visualisation plays across the entire data-drive process.

• Catherine D’Ignazio & Lauren F. Klein: Data Feminism — Data never speaks for itself. This online books is a cohesive look at the challenges / bias in the data collections, analysis, visualisation, communication as well as the ethics and societal impact which is not talked.

• Insight Machines: The Past, Present, and Future of Visualization Recommendation — An overview on the history and challenges faced in automating and augmenting the creation of visualisation for insight.

• Natural Language Interface for Data Visualisation — An overview article on natural language as interface for input and output modality for visualisation creation and analysis.

• PAIR Guidebook: People + AI - Human-centered approach to building Data Products with AI and Visualisation. Focuses on the intersection of Design and Augemented Intelligence.

Books & References

• Amit Kapoor: Books & References — A list of books and blog resources related to data visualisation.