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:
Your background and what type of work you do
If you subscribed to this newsletter you probably know at least a little bit about me, so I’ll keep this short. I was a biologist, then I was a data analyst, now I’m a data visualization designer and developer. If you want my life story, you can read all about it on my website!
In my career I’ve done a lot of different types of work, and they all inform what I do now. I consider myself a professional researcher and communicator: I do research to answer interesting questions and then communicate those findings in the most engaging, clear, and memorable way possible. Sometimes that means infographics, sometimes it’s just words, or an interactive visualization, and often it’s a combination of all these and more.
What you hope to get out of this newsletter
This will not be your typical dataviz newsletter. I won't be including best-of roundups, tips and tricks, or top 10 resources to learn D3. There’s plenty of that content out there, and my goal with this newsletter is to branch out and expose readers to other sources of inspiration, resources that fly under the radar, and what we can learn from other communities. As Uncle Iroh explained to Zuko in Avatar The Last Airbender:
“It is important to draw wisdom from different places. If you take it from only one place it becomes rigid and stale.”
sidenote: if you haven’t seen Avatar, stop reading this and go watch it right now, it’s one of the best TV shows ever and it’s on Netflix
Unfortunately in a certain portion of the dataviz community, there’s a lot of this rigidity and staleness (of course not you dear reader, you're awesome and hip, that's why you subscribed to this newsletter!). Many people look at data and are too concerned with “What is the right chart for this and what is the best tool to build that chart?” and not concerned enough with "What is the right way to communicate this?" To develop a more holistic practice, we’ll explore topics from graphic design, history, music, game design, architecture, and more. Sometimes there will be a clear and obvious connection to dataviz, other times you might just come away happy to have learned something new and interesting.
My other hope is that this newsletter is less of me talking at you, and more of me talking with you. Currently, my primary way of interacting with the folks that like my work is through Twitter. I love Twitter, but it does sometimes feel like me shouting into a megaphone at a crowd. I want this newsletter to be more like the symposia of ancient Greece: a group of likeminded people meeting to share their work, discuss the events of the time, and enrich their learning through shared conversation. Of course the symposia of ancient Greece also typically included drinking, music, and dancing, so if you want to read this newsletter with a drink in hand while doing a jig and rocking out, all the better.
The primary reasons for asking (and answering) these questions is to start a conversation and get to know everyone better so that this can feel more like a symposium and less like a lecture. At any time you can respond to one of these emails and share your own thoughts on something I posted, something you read, or just how your day was--I love getting mail. I’m also likely to feature reader responses in the newsletter. If you send me any resources or pieces of work that I particularly like I’ll feature them, and if there’s been some lively feedback on something I shared in a previous newsletter I’ll do a roundup of the responses I got.
A great book or article you read recently
I talk about fonts way too much, so I figured I would give you a taste of what’s to come and talk about an incredible new typeface from Kris Sowersby of Klim Type Foundry. Kris is one of the best typeface designers working today, and last week he released Signifier, a brutalist interpretation of 17th century serif typefaces. The typeface itself is a marvel, one of the most beautiful I’ve seen and certain to be a huge hit in the design community. But just as impressive is the essay that Kris wrote on the design process. In it he discusses how Signifier came to be a mash-up of Brutalism and English Roman typefaces--not exactly an obvious pairing.
The impetus was something I’ve struggled with many times while designing charts: you begin with a historical inspiration, but you don’t want to simply reproduce the historical example, you want to reinterpret it and update it for the 21st century. In the case of Signifier, Kris asked “What makes a font truly digital?” At their core, digital fonts are a collection of bezier curves. Thinking about the material of a digital font led Kris to study Brutalism, and he found insights on the meaning of Brutalism from architectural historian Michael Abrahamson
“The word ‘Brutalism’ has lost its meaning. At present, it equates to: large buildings, sometimes of concrete, constructed sometime between World War II and the end of the 1970s.”
Another quote from Peter Smithton clarifies the true meaning of Brutalism:
“Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of the material, that is with the question: what can it do? And by analogy: there is a way of handling gold in a Brutalist manner and it does not mean rough and cheap, it means: what is its raw quality?”
Kris goes on to discuss how this understanding of Brutalism influenced the design of Signifier:
“My question now became, “what is the raw quality of digital fonts?” Digital fonts are strings of co-ordinates rasterized as images on screens and surfaces. Bézier curves are visualised equations. When we manipulate Bézier handles, we change the parameters of the equation. I stopped working against what I was seeing and started to work with the tools and screen. I deleted details, replaced curves with lines and snapped to the grid. Consciously making things consistent, I practiced a sort of typographic quantization.”
The essay continues and I recommend reading it all, but this part about Brutalism got me thinking about how this relates to data visualization. What is the raw quality of a chart? Is it to convey data? To communicate a message? To influence a decision? And how would the answer to this question influence our design decisions? I don’t know yet, it’s something I’m still thinking about today and I’ll probably be thinking about for a long time. If you have thoughts, respond to this email and let me know, I want to hear them!
Before we wrap this up, a little bit of business. This newsletter was mostly about introductions and setting the stage, but I’ll release another issue shortly that dives right into the content I promised. I will also give personal updates when I have something interesting to share. I don’t have a set schedule for the newsletter. I will aim for roughly one per month, but I want to publish only when I have something good to say. That means you may get two in one month and none in another, it’ll be a fun surprise! (hence the tagline, “Irregular Timing, Irregular Content”). Finally, my very unscientific market research tells me that a lot of people follow me because they want to know how to learn D3. Sorry to disappoint anyone, but there will be no D3 tutorials in this newsletter. If you want to know how to learn D3, my advice is go read this article from my blog, then read this much better article by Diana MacDonald, then go buy Amelia Wattenberger’s Fullstack D3 book, then go sign up for Shirley Wu’s D3 courses on Frontend Masters, which I believe are getting an update soon. I will continue to publish tutorials and related content on my blog, but I promise if you keep following this newsletter, it’ll be more valuable than any D3 tutorial I could give you. Thank you to everyone who subscribed ❤️💛💚💙💜
Until next time,
— Will