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Hi Friends!
Welcome to the December edition of What's Rocking!
This won't be a Design Matters issue. It'll instead be one of those "2023 retro" emails we get around this time of the year. I hope you enjoy it!
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##If your plan fails, plan again!
The last time I was able to sit down and write this newsletter was *early October*. It has been a bit over two months! Back then, I had planned to release an exciting project I've been working on for the better part of 2023.
I had initially planned to release the beta version of my Dataviz Design System in Figma in late November. I even asked you to let me know if you'd be interested in getting early access! But life happened, and moving houses took way more time, effort and sweat than I anticipated.
In case you did not know, I moved to my first-ever non-rented home in mid-October. It's been quite the journey, and I haven't been able to do any work I planned for these past 6-8 weeks. I am usually pretty good with deadlines I establish for myself, but this time I was completely wrong.
Lesson learned: do not announce something big if you're not 100% sure you can be 110% there for your launch plan. If you've expressed interest in the beta release, it will now happen in early 2024 - it wouldn't be good for anyone if I tried to do it over Christmas, so Q1 2024 it is.
--- ##2023 was the year I wrote
In late 2022, while doing my year retrospective and thinking about what I wanted to do in the year ahead, I thought it was about time to start doing some marketing for Data Rocks.
I dreaded it. I am primarily a *maker of things*. I like to design and build stuff. Next, I am a teacher. I love sharing what I know with others and getting them as excited as I am about designing and doing dataviz stuff.
Marketing, though, is not about doing. It's about telling others what you did, can do, or will do. I am not good at that. Like many fellow creatives, I feel awkward at the thought of self-aggrandising with strange hyperboles. But if you have a business - especially a one-person business like Data Rocks - you have to make peace with this idea sooner or later.
But the more I read about it, the less I wanted to do it. Most marketing content out there these days is sadly filled with engagement bait strategies for social media or heavily focused on video content.
Short-form video is all the rage, they say. Create a TikTok account! Do short clips for Pinterest! *Take selfies to drive engagement on LinkedIn*. I inevitably wondered *when did it become so ok to focus so much on myself and not on the things I do well?*
"Blogging is dead";
"No one likes to read anymore";
"Writing takes too long for too little return"!
Says everyone when I ask about written content.
So, going against all advice and doing the other thing I do well - carving a path for myself, even if it goes against everyone's best suggestions - I decided to write instead.
I have always been an avid reader. I love long-form content. That hasn't changed just because I now also like some forms of video content. I can safely say that I learned almost everything I know from reading what someone else wrote - in blog posts, social media, newsletters, or books. I learn by reading, then doing, then reading again, then doing more.
Surely people who would rather skim through a 4000-word article to find what they need instead of skipping through a 20-minute-long video still exist, right?
So, I wrote. Mostly for myself in the beginning. But adapting as I went along, curating things a bit more as I formed an audience. I may not have broken any (frankly arbitrary) social media standards, but I can say I did build a wee niche audience of people who find what I write useful in some form.
And marketing? That became a bit secondary. If writing happened to help Data Rocks become better known by more people, then it's a big win. But I decided that I write to help and to share what is mostly just inside my head.
Recording knowledge and making it available to others is an important thing we often overlook.
And so, 2023 was the year I wrote.
2023 In numbers
So, how did it all go? We're data people, after all, aren't we?
Here's the summary:
In 2023, I wrote:
86.570 words (including these you're reading now).
22 reviews from The Dataviz Bookshelf
16 emails for this newsletter
I published 34 stories on Medium
22 of those are reposts from the blog, while 12 are Medium-exclusive versions of the reels I used to post on LinkedIn.
Here's the top content of the year:
The most-read book review was Visualisation Analysis & Design by Tamara Munzner or the What-Why-How of data viz. with 662 views!
On Medium, even though most of the content are reposts from my blog, the most-read book review was Why every good analysis starts with a good question, with Warren Berger’s Beautiful Questions. It has 434 views!
By far, my most successful newsletter issue this year was Design Matters #7 - The Ultimate Dashboard Colour Palette in Practice. It had an incredible 1.335 views!
Just as a reference, the second most read article was the one where I played around with ChatGPT, trying to make it do colours. It had 229 views! It was also the unofficial first issue of the Design Matters series
which started in July.
In May, I published an article on Nightingale, the Data Visualization Society's magazine. Talk about a happy person! Bucket list item! I wrote about my dataviz self-portrait.
In terms of social media, I joined Bluesky and Mastodon, shared way less than before on Twitter and focused on LinkedIn. I started January with 51 followers on the Data Rocks LinkedIn page, and so far, I have 965 followers!!! It is an incredible number to me! Thank you so much for letting me into your digital spaces!
In July, I started a little page where you can buy me a coffee if you like. 6 people have generously contributed and left kind words about my content, and I would like to thank them from the bottom of my caffeinated heart.
For someone who'd rather write, I also joined 2 YouTube lives. The first one was a Fireside Chat about AI in dataviz, moderated by the Data Visualisation Society. The other was an informal chat with Ben a.k.a The Power BI Guy, where we talked about Power BI, Tableau, D3, data art and more. It was a lot of fun!
And last, In July, I opened my little online shop!
And as a token of my appreciation, readers of this newsletter get 10% off the Data Design Manifesto posters until the end of the year! Just use the code THANKU2023NL at the checkout!
##Thank you, everyone, so much for supporting my work this year. To all clients, newsletter subscribers, social media and real-life dataviz friends, have a great break and see you again in early 2024!
All the best, T.
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