By a large margin, the most popular thing I've ever done is give a talk at Rstudioconf 2020 called The Glamour of Graphics. The premise of the talk is that designing beautiful charts matters—it shows respect for your audience, makes your results seem more trustworthy, and makes people stop and pay attention to what you have to say. In the talk I show that making beautiful charts doesn't require an inherent artistic talent, and can be achieved by anyone through applying the fundamental principles of design.

That talk clearly resonated with people; I still get messages about it to this day, and a majority of the speaking and teaching requests I get are off the back of that talk. So I decided to double down and turn it into a course! In a short conference talk I could barely scratch the surface of layout, typography, and color, but in this course we take a deep dive into each of these topics, plus new sections on the fundamentals of data visualization and special topics like legends, annotations, and accessibility.

If you follow this newsletter you know this course has been a long time in the making. I'm really proud of it, and I hope you'll check it out. The course is 25% off until the 27th of January, so if you're interested, make sure to take advantage of the discount! See all about it here: https://rfortherestofus.com/courses/glamour/

Hello, been a while eh? (I say things like 'eh' now because I'm a Minnesotan). If you forgot, I'm Will, I'm a visual journalist who works at Axios telling stories with data, and I write this infrequent newsletter about dataviz, and more recently about my life. I used to live in Philadelphia but yesterday I moved to Minneapolis. Currently I'm surrounded by heaps of boxes but happy to be here. I decided to write a journal about the move, which you can read here: https://www.notion.so/willchase/Moving-to-Minnesota-f4387d389646419c80377d5a1e1367b0

A few weeks ago my team at Axios published our biggest story yet: a deep dive into diversity in the MCU. This project was a massive undertaking, both in the amount of illustration we did (aren't the illos amazing!?), and in the huge database we compiled for the project. It has consumed my life for the last several months, I'm really proud of it, and I hope you like it too.

Hello from Will, your favorite data journalist. Just a quick reminder that the Elevate Live dataviz conference I've helped to put together is happening TODAY, I really hope you can drop by!

When: 11:00AM – 3:00PM EST

Where: YouTube Livestream

What: A mixture of talks, lightning talks, and Q&As, all about information design from members of our community

Welcome to another infrequent edition of Will's Newsletter, and happy first day of May! (can it please stop being cold now, ty)

If Elon Musk really does buy Twitter, this newsletter might become my only way to launch my thoughts into the void—then you'll get more than one of these emails every couple months, for better or worse. For now, my feelings on the whole Twitter thing can be summed up by this faux Onion-esque headline I came across, "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Bought the Website You Hate but Spend All of Your Time On"

From June 14–18 I'll be at EYEO Festival in Minneapolis, if you'll be there hit me up and we'll hang out!

Writing is a requirement for just about every job, and being a good writer will take you far, regardless of your career. I started my dataviz career through blogging, and I've always been a big advocate for contributing learning resources to the community. So you may find it odd that on my blog, I haven't published a single article in 2021. It does make me a little sad to see the blog languishing, but the reality is I've written more in 2021 than any other time in my life.

A quick tally:

• I wrote six of these newsletters, many of which could be full blog posts on their own

• I wrote four articles for Axios and contributed to a couple more (yes visual journalists write too!)

• I wrote six blog posts for the dataviz membership program I help run, and contributed to eight more
  
  

About that membership program...

Hello, it’s been a while, and in that while I've been busy. I’m rereading one of the greatest books ever written, Going Postal by Terry Pratchett, and I could sum up my last few months with a quote:

“Always keep moving. There may be something behind you.”

And indeed I have been moving. It’s been a nonstop forward motion, luckily more like rolling down a hill than falling down the stairs (sometimes it’s the latter).

• My team at Axios has grown by nearly 200% in the last 6 months, and we're not stopping there, onward and upward

• I’m now 100% done with the slides and lectures for my dataviz design course, and I'm beginning to record the lectures and prepare materials

• I got to work with some really amazing people on an exciting freelance project. Can’t say much about it at the moment but hopefully it’ll all be public soon enough

• Fun fact: my alternate choice for the quote above was “Always move fast. You never know who’s catching up.” (seriously if you’ve never read Pratchett, go pick up Going Postal, it’s incredible)

• We’re wrapping up the beta phase of the dataviz membership program I run with Duncan Geere, Alli Torban, and Gabrielle Merite, and we’re preparing to launch the full thing publicly. The beta phase has been a smashing success and I’m so proud of what we've built! If you’d like to be notified about the public launch, you can join our wait list
  
  

Welcome back! It's been a while, and I've had quite a busy summer!

I'm back now and excited to be working on new projects both at work and for myself. Two of my main side-projects right now are related to teaching, which I'm really enjoying. I'm still developing my upcoming course on data visualization design, having almost finished writing the lectures now.

The second teaching project is my previously-mentioned data visualization membership program with Alli Torban, Duncan Geere and Gabrielle Merite. We launched the beta phase this week and I'm really proud of what we pulled together: the site looks amazing and we've already got heaps of great content! If you wanted to be a part of the beta, and you filled out our survey, then you should have an email in your inbox telling you how to sign up. If you don’t, or you wanted to join but missed the boat before, then hit reply to this email and I’ll sort you out.

In June I spent about two weeks in Cape Cod, vacationing with my family. It was peaceful, relaxing, and beautiful as always (see evidence below).

A little over a year ago, I sat in a ballroom at Rstudio::conf, in stunned awe of the keynote talk I had just seen, given by renowned visualization researchers Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. The talk was a tour de force of data visualization, presenting totally novel dataviz methods that were both technically astounding and beautifully designed. As the applause died down, questions started rolling in, and right off the bat came a zinger, "Why are you, as visualization experts, using pie charts?"

I suspect that the question was at least partially tongue-in-cheek, but I was still disappointed that after such an inspiring talk, some people were just interested in parroting one of the most tired dogmas in dataviz: no pie charts.

Dogmas arise as shortcuts. As a beginner in a new field, there's so much new stuff to learn, so we use rules to help: do this, don't do that. Easy. Simple. Clean. These rules can indeed be helpful, but they should be thought of as starting points, not the be all end all. The problem comes when you never move past the rules. To quote Andy Kirk:

Far too often in visualisation, things that are supposed to be considered as general guidelines get marked up — and preached to others — as rigid rules when they can’t be universally applied. Don’t label your axis? Might not need it. Don’t offer a colour legend? The colours may be immediately obvious in their association. Using red and green? Maybe your audience has no colour-blind members.

A few weeks ago I pitched an idea to my team at Axios to do a coronavirus variant tracker. I had read several news stories about these new variants sweeping the country, and wanted to know more, so I went searching one night, and the only variant tracker I could find was incredibly complex. It was very impressive in the amount of information provided, but was long, difficult to find the info you needed, and was clearly written for a scientist. I thought we could do better, so I set out to design something that would be easily approachble for lay people, and would summarize the key info quickly, and at a glance.

Now that it’s all published, I’m really happy with how it turned out and the excellent reception it’s received. But it was definitely a stressful experience to build on such a tight deadline. Here’s a few of the things that went right (and wrong) leading to the project being successful.

Disclaimer: If you’re sick and tired of hearing about NFTs, I totally get it, no problem. But if you’re skeptical or critical of them or if you don’t really get what this whole crypto art thing is, I encourage you to read on. My own thoughts on crypto art are still very much evolving, and I see my own involvement as entirely experimental, but as a former (and current) crypto art skeptic, I think what follows might surprise you.

Welcome to a life updates issue of Will's Newsletter. If you're reading this on Sunday morning, then I hope you'll join me and my friend Gabrielle Merite this afternoon at our unconference session for Outlier conf. At 3:40PM Eastern time we'll be doing a fun newlyweds style game followed by a Q&A, so come hang out, chat, and ask me anything you'd like!

The main update today is that I just quit my job. For the last year, I've been working at Fidelity as a data visualization designer. The company is great, my colleagues are great, and by all metrics it was an excellent job. But after a year in the role, I realized I'm just uninterested in the world of dashboards and KPIs.

One of the drawbacks of my job with Fidelity was that none of my work was public-facing. What I truly love is telling interesting stories in new and exciting ways, and that was an itch Fidelity just couldn't scratch. So, I'm incredibly excited that my new position is a visual journalist at Axios! I'm so excited to get started telling more stories, but I'm not publizicing this position yet, so please keep it quiet for now.

Happy holidays, merry Christmas, happy new year, and happy birthday (to me!)

This time of year is an avalanche of celebrations: December 25th is Christmas (always a big to do with my family), the 31st we have New Years Eve, and then of course, New Years Day, which also happens to be my birthday. As someone who hates being the center of attention, I usually spend New Years Eve / my birthday at home cooking something with my family or having drinks at home with a few friends. Of course, this year, I don't have much choice, and your New Years will probably look a lot more like mine.

Like most people, I didn't accomplish all that I wanted in 2020, and that's just fine. But when you're always looking towards the next goal, it's easy to forget all that you did achieve. I set myself 5 professional development goals for 2020, and turns out that I (mostly) achieved them

1. Read more Yep, I've done a ton of reading this year on design, typography, dataviz, and lots more. I'll be posting something on Twitter soon about all the books I've read this year.
2. Collaborate more This is the most rewarding thing I've done this year. I currently have two major projects on which I'm collaborating with other people who are better than me at certain things, and I'm learning so much from them. I've also made friends with and started supporting and being supported by lots of incredible people in the community--a rare upside to everyone reaching out over zoom.
3. Become more confident with JS I'm about 1000x more confident with JS than I was at this time last year. Although there's always more to learn, I came a long way this year, including learning Svelte, another secret goal of mine :)
4. Finally learn SASS eh, I'll file this one under sorta. I didn't really master it, but I've used basic SASS in a couple of projects and feel like I could get into it and use it whenever needed.
5. Learn proper build tools Another one I'll file under sorta. Again I didn't master these, but I learned a lot more, and at least I'm slightly more comfortable with Node and now use Rollup or Parcel on several projects (although I still have no idea how to set these up from scratch)

In my welcome newsletter I said you could expect about one email per month, but I also said to expect the unexpected (Irregular Content, Irregular Timing, remember?) So welcome to a surprise special issue of Will's Newsletter.

I'm excited to announce a new project about The Office! Some of you may know that I'm a diehard Office superfan, and last year during one of my watchthroughs I noticed a few cases I'd never realized before of Michael Scott misquoting something. It's a well-known running gag in the show that Michael will misattribute quotes, botch common idioms, etc. But these new examples I noticed were not documented anywhere. I scoured reddit, internet listicles, and dunderpedia, but as far as I could tell I had documented a new botched phrase. It got me thinking what other examples of this gag I'd missed, so I decided to catalogue them. I went through the resources I mentioned above and started making a spreadsheet of every example I could find on the internet. It was a pretty impressive and hilarious list, so I decided to take it to the next level: I went through the show and watched each episode with my spreadsheet open. Any time Michael said something even remotely questionable, I googled it and added any new botched phrases or misquotes to my spreadsheet. It was both hilarious and fascinating to finally understand all these jokes I'd never even noticed before (many of them very subtle and clever). At the end I was excited to see I collected over 200 botched phrases, and I estimate 3/4 of these are never-before-documented.

This is normally where I'd give you the link to the project, but that's the fun part, there is no project... yet. Also early last year I started live streaming some design and coding work on Twitch. I only did ~5 streams, and I was mostly playing around with my setup and just seeing what it was like, but I had the idea to eventually stream a full dataviz project from start to finish. Well, this is that project.

Starting in the next couple of weeks I'll stream my process of data analysis, design, and front-end engineering to build this project. I'll also be announcing this on Twitter soon, but for now it's a special secret just for newsletter subscribers (so please keep it hush-hush). As subscribers I'm also giving you some other goodies. First is access to the data: you can browse all of my raw data (incomplete in places) here. And if you think I missed one of Michael's botched phrases (I'm sure I missed many!) you can submit any examples you have using this form.

A couple weeks ago, a company called Hive published a ranking of the top 500 dataviz twitter accounts. They created the list using their own algorithm called "Peoplerank". My own account (@W_R_Chase, please follow me 😘) was way down at number 366. I thought this whole thing was a rather elaborate way for Hive to tell me my tweets suck, I mean people tell me that all the time, and they've never needed a fancy algorithm to figure it out! So, clearly this list has no credibility since I wasn't in the top 10, but it did reveal an interesting connection: several generative artists made the list. And I'm not just talking people like me who dabble in generative art, I mean heavy-hitters like Zach Lieberman, @inconvergent, @beesandbombs, Frederik Vanhoutte, and Jessica Rosenkrantz.

Perhaps this is some peculiarity of the algorithm, but I think it reveals a real connection. At a talk I gave last year on creative coding I showed what I call the dataviz <--> generative art spectrum.

I think about this spectrum primarily as the combination of two variables: the input and the intended outcome. On the far left we have pure dataviz, where the input is structured data that represents real-world observations, and the desired outcome is to clearly communicate those data and their meaning to the audience. As we move towards the center the input remains structured data, but the desired outcome shifts slightly. Our goal is often still to represent and communicate some information, but we have another goal of creating something beautiful and artistic, and this goal may begin to encroach upon the communication aspect. Perhaps now we choose a visual representation that isn't technically as clear and accurate, but it's more beautiful and engaging. As we move further towards the generative art side of the spectrum, our goal shifts more and more towards creating something beautiful, and away from a faithful representation of data. The input also shifts at this point, it may be somewhere in-between: data that has been altered with randomness. But as we get entirely to the generative side we do away with data as the input and shift to something randomly generated.

Hello and welcome to Will’s Newsletter! Through this newsletter you'll probably learn a lot about me, so I'd love to learn a little about you. You can respond to this email to tell me more about:

• Your background and what type of work you do
• Why you subscribed and what you hope to get out of this newsletter
• A great book or article you read recently
• Anything else you feel like sharing

I’ll start by answering these questions myself: