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/
Backstory
Like most things in my life, The Glamour of Graphics started out as a joke. I believe it was Kelly Bodwin who posted the original pun on the Grammar of Graphics in a Twitter thread and I took that idea and made a spoof Glamour magazine cover for it (featuring Hadley Wickham, naturally).
The spoof went semi-viral (at least by my standards) and it launched me into a talk at Rstudioconf 2020. Now I had to figure out how to turn a silly joke into an actual talk that people would find helpful. I often find conference talks either too niche to be broadly applicable or too broad so I don't feel that I learned anything useful. I wanted to hit that sweet spot of a talk that presents an opinion, but also gives specific and practical tips people can actually use.
In many ways I modeled the promise of the talk after my own experience. I started out as a scientist with no education in design and no inherent artistic talent. And my graphs were ugly. After teaching myself the fundamentals of design and practicing a lot, I got to a place where I could make beautiful graphs. So this was very much a "If I can do it, so can you!" talk.
The talk went great, and my only regret was all the things I had to cut for length. So imagine how excited I was when I bumped into David Keyes at the airport on my way home and he asked if I'd like to turn the talk into a course. David is an R educator who runs his own course platform called R for the Rest of Us focused on inclusive R education for non-programmers—I couldn't imagine a better fit. Since I had lots of interest in the teaching part of a course, but no interest in figuring out how to produce it, host it, or market it, partnering with David sounded like the perfect plan and we got to it.
Originally I planned to have the course out in less than a year, but a lot of things happened... I got married, got a new job, and there was this global pandemic thing that got in the way. Which are all excuses for why it took me twice as long as I thought. But ultimately I wanted to do it right, not fast, and I think I achieved that.
And now for something totally different! One of the major upsides of moving to Minnesota is that I no longer live in a control state, meaning I can buy just about any kind of liquor I want, not just those that the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board approves. This influx of new booze coincided with several new cocktail books. I've particularly enjoyed Natasha David's Drink Lightly, a book focused on modern low-ABV cocktails. In the book David states, "I've never had the desire to get drunk, and the handful of times I got room-spinning drunk, I had zero fun." Perhaps a surprising sentiment for a professional bartender, but it resonated with me. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good buzz, but I drink because I like the social aspect and I enjoy the flavors of different drinks—the different expressions fermentation can lend to a beer, or the terroir of different wines, or the shining flavor of a perfectly balanced cocktail—not because I want to forget my night.
The biggest downside of all these new books is that I now have too many drinks I want to make, but not enough tools to figure out which one I can or should make. Most cocktail books have lots of specs (that's what cocktail elitists call recipes) but an insufficient index to easily find a spec that you're looking for. The other problem is that most of these specs require several obscure ingredients, many of which are missing even from my well stocked bar. So, what I really need is a database of these specs that I can search for aspects of a drink I want like "stirred gin drinks with blanc vermouth served up" and find specs that match my search and that I can make with the ingredients in my bar.
I want this tool so often that I even started designing what it would look like, but there's a long, long way to go before I have an actual app. Not to mention I've got about five other projects I need to finish first (soon, new website, I promise!) On the off chance that I've got any cocktail nerd readers, let me know your thoughts, what would you want in an app like this? Otherwise, thanks for reading, and until next time!