Napkin.ai

From the website: "Napkin turns your text into visuals so sharing your ideas is quick and effective." Sounds interesting and there is a free version.

Try it here: https://www.napkin.ai/

Times New Roman vs Calibri

This argument is old and the facts are clear, but of course this is back in news recently with the State Department switching back to Times New Roman because Calibri is too woke for them.

The NYT has a nice article: Is Times New Roman Better Than Calibri for the State Department?

Personally, I have been using Calibri for my slidedecks for a long time: it is simple, looks good, and is easy to read. But...maybe a little boring. For text I prefer Garamond - I think it looks elegant & sophisticated. But...Arial is Google Docs default & thus most of my text is now in Arial.

The Periodic Table Of Data Viz

Pretty cool, but uesless: https://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

How To Make Animated GIFs

Great video: How to Make Dataviz GIFs (4 Steps with Free Software)

1. Assemble the frames as slides in MS PPT.
2. Save each frame as an image (use JPG as it creates a white background).
3. Upload the JPGs to a free GIF website (e.g. Ezgif).
4. Share the animated GIF!

Or, make it natively in MS PPT = save as animated GIF! But this does not allow you to adjust the timings between the frames and transitions.

Blender & Canva

Sounds like Blender & Canva are taking over the 3D & 2D graphic design world - interesting! I'm not surprised to see Blender here, but Canva used to be considered an amateur tool. Read more about it here. 

Greenhouse Effect Infographic

 
Source: Sabine Hossenfelder / Twitter

Color Buddy

Color Buddy looks a little complicated, but may help you build better color palettes for use in data viz.

Rowboat

Rowboat is a tool to quickly explore massive data tables (CSV or MS Excel) in your browser window. Sounds a little niche, but whatever works!

Five ways to improve your chart axes

Five ways to improve your chart axes is not particularly new or original, but the R crowd will appreciate the code examples provided.

Data GIF Maker

Cool: the Data GIF Maker (by Google) is a super-simple animated GIF maker for data / charts.

The Problem With Bar Charts

Pretty nerdy stuff: The Problem With Bar Charts

Become a data viz SUPERSTAR

This loks promising: Become a data viz SUPERSTAR is a 5-part YouTube series from the folks @ storytelling with data to become, well, a data viz superstar. Could be usefuf for teaching data analysis and data viz.

What's the best font?

Here's an issues best avoided: stressing-out over fonts! The best advice for most of us is simpe: use a serif font for text and a sans-serif font for data, tables, chart labels, etc.

That being said: What’s your type? Try these tests to pick the perfect font for you from the Washington Post is a nice demonstration how changing the font impacts the way you read and write.

Color & Contrast

 An interactive guide to color & contrast (by Nate Baldwin) is just that - a comprehensive guide for exploring and learning about the theory, science, and perception of color and contrast. The details get a little wonky, but the section on UI & Data Visualization offers sound practical advice.

The World Data Viz Prize (2023)

Explore & get inspired @ https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/world-dataviz-prize-2023-shortlist/. I like the distinction between static & interactive.

And here are the winners!

The New Way To Publish!

This is great! First, you have an allroud excellent paper, published OPEN in Nature Medicine. Second, you get a cool animated data viz where you can drill into the data and results yourself. Now all you need to add is a simple Data Download button and this would be perfect. Have a look:

Kephart, J.L., Sánchez, B.N., Moore, J. et al. City-level impact of extreme temperatures and mortality in Latin America. Natire Medicine (2022).

Colors!

Here are two great blog posts about colors by Lisa Charlotte Muth / Datawrapper:

• A detailed guide to colors in data vis style guides
• 10 ways to use fewer colors in your data visualizations

The Best Maps/Charts/Data Viz of 2021

It's that time of the year when the Top-10, 20, 30, 40, 50, etc. lists of 2021 come-out:

• Maps Mania Maps of the Year
• Favourite maps of 2021 (Ken Field)
• Data Viz Projects (Nathan Yau)

Climate Change Solutions

Here ar a bunch of reasonable & robust plans out there to get to netzero carbon emissions by 2050 - here's one visualization of some of those plans: How to Get the World to Netzero Carbon Emissions by 2050 – A Graphical Guide.

I especially appreciate thaat the data are included as a shared Google Sheet - that's the way to do it!

Sections in MS PPT

I'm not using MS PPT all that much these days, but here's a nice example of why MS PPT is still better than Google Slides: How to Organize PowerPoint Slides with "Sections"