In my effort to build and keep my skills fresh, I was on the lookout for another viz I could do.
When I started looking, Mother's Day was right around the corner, so I thought I'd go to my trusty national retail federation site to see what they had in store for me (bad pun, I know). I go to the Retail Insight Center which has a wealth of information and since I like shopping and worked retail in college, I can relate.
When I started looking, Mother's Day was right around the corner, so I thought I'd go to my trusty national retail federation site to see what they had in store for me (bad pun, I know). I go to the Retail Insight Center which has a wealth of information and since I like shopping and worked retail in college, I can relate.
When I looked at the charts, they weren't horrible, so it's not like I was thinking, "Ah yes, let me makeover this horrendous viz." Rather, I wanted to explore and see if there was a story there. And, I think I found one in the data. But first, how to present it.
The last time I went to NRF's site, I made the viz below. The best laid plans...it's chart junky and really could have been better, I'll admit that. I really should go back and fix it because there are so many things wrong with it (though I do like the area chart).
So what to do? I like to have fun and I wanted a fun viz but at the same time, I didn't want the winter holiday shopping viz trainwreck. That's when I thought about getting a Mother's Day card and it seemed to fall into place (I think. If not, be kind with your criticism).
So a couple of things about this viz that I like and how I balanced fun with hopefully a good design. It looks like a Mother's Day Card, which I think is fun. I used pages from my digital scrapbooking software to create the "card". When you click the bouquet (which is an embellishment from the software), you see the inside of the card. I tried to tie in the colors, which all correspond to the palette shown on the cover, to around three color choices. I also tried to tell the story that I found in the data, which to me is that Mother's Day is the third largest holiday from a spending perspective (I actually thought it was second) and that online isn't quite as popular as I thought it would have been since people still plan to go to stores to buy gifts. Since I had a little extra space, I floated a little line graph on historic Mother's Day spending by the first chart.
I went back and forth on the background color. While I really like the blue as a background, given that the front of the card was blue, I thought it was too much, so I went with purple. Because I wanted it to have that card feel, I signed it kind of like how I sign my Mother's Day (and almost any card), with a heart and my name. Keeping in mind what I learned from Jock McKinlay's session at Tapestry, I wanted people to have access to the the site where I got the data, so the heart links to the Mother's Day overview from NRF. Of course, if you download the workbook, you have the data I used too.
So, there you have it. What every mother wants...a Mother's Day Viz. Maybe it's the thought that counts!
Happy Mother's Day!
I went back and forth on the background color. While I really like the blue as a background, given that the front of the card was blue, I thought it was too much, so I went with purple. Because I wanted it to have that card feel, I signed it kind of like how I sign my Mother's Day (and almost any card), with a heart and my name. Keeping in mind what I learned from Jock McKinlay's session at Tapestry, I wanted people to have access to the the site where I got the data, so the heart links to the Mother's Day overview from NRF. Of course, if you download the workbook, you have the data I used too.
So, there you have it. What every mother wants...a Mother's Day Viz. Maybe it's the thought that counts!
Happy Mother's Day!
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