As Sophia from the Golden Girls would say, " Picture it. The Eastern Shore of Maryland, 2017. I was sitting on my parents couch and thought I should take advantage of the Special Sunday ahead of me on the Memorial Day Weekend. I wanted to do something data vizzy. Since I think about nutrition a lot, my first thought was around a serving of five veggies a day is good for me, so why not see if a serving of five vizzes would be good too? Hence, the #5vizadaychallenge was born.
I started off with this viz based on a tweet I saw about milk preferences for Indy500 drivers. It's kind of weird how I look at something and think, "I wonder how I would viz that?" Five years ago, that thought would have never crossed my mind.
By the way, if you saw that crash! Wow!!! It's amazing no one was hurt! No clue what I'm talking about? Check it here. Cause I'm a full service blog 😂
So as for the viz, I just played around and had fun and much to my surprise, I used a tree map. I trend to be a pretty simple viz person with lines and bars, a function of not having the skills to do the fanciness one would see all over Twitter. By the by, that's mostly a function of not having enough practice time in the tool.
There was one thing though that I really wanted to have as part of the viz and that was better labeling. I didn't want the label to show '17 whole'. I set out to find how I could add more of a narrative. A quick google search led me to a post on the forum which after a couple of tries, yielded almost the result I was looking for. One other point is that I wanted the viz to be readable on mobile, since that's how I consume a lot of stuff. So here's the before and after.
There was one thing though that I really wanted to have as part of the viz and that was better labeling. I didn't want the label to show '17 whole'. I set out to find how I could add more of a narrative. A quick google search led me to a post on the forum which after a couple of tries, yielded almost the result I was looking for. One other point is that I wanted the viz to be readable on mobile, since that's how I consume a lot of stuff. So here's the before and after.
Before
After
One down, four to go! I've got this!
Since it was Memorial Day weekend, I wanted to do a biz about military deaths because of a guy who I went to high school with who made the ultimate sacrifice. Again, full service blog, check out this video that was made in his memory.
I found the data and got to vizzing. Looking at this now, I can't believe I used green for the font with a red themed viz. I also see a few other things I would change (the color of the font, maybe reversing the color palette are two that come to mind).
Two down, three to go! But time was not on my side. I had a 1.5 hour drive, dropped kiddo 1 off to a friend's house, had dinner with my best bird (kiddo 2), & went grocery shopping. But I was going to give it a go!
Since I didn't plan out this challenge, I started thinking through some data I could get my hands on pretty easy. Duh! I have a treasure trove of fitness data. I slept crummy the night before. Try sleeping with two kids in a full size bed because they just looooovvvvveeeee you so much. I love them but my back doesn't. And I'm pretty sure I was sleeping on bird's emoji purse at one point. 😩 Enter viz 3: How did I sleep in May? Also, I have a spelling error & there's something funky with the data. But since my goal was to viz and the trend would be accurate, I went with it.
At this point, it was 10:30 and I still had two vizzes to go. Oohhhh fudge. I was doubting my commitment to sparkle motion. And with that, I have referenced two of my favorite movies (A Christmas Story and Donnie Darko).
At this point, I was sweating it. I started looking on my laptop for data that I could quickly viz. I had this metro reliability data, so that was good enough to viz. All I could think about was #unsuckmetro
11pm and its way past my bedtime. I went to the laptop again and found some twitter data I had. Good enough! Let's do this (because I was tired and wanted to be done)! I wasn't looking to do a major analysis at this point, so I found a metric and vizzed. The 5th and final viz was done around 11:30pm!!! I actually met this crazy, unplanned challenge!
Challenge Takeaways
- I should do this more often. I prioritize other things (work, momming, & fitness) above vizzing. So taking a time out when I 'just do the work' is nice.
- Five vizzes that aren't really gonna wow the world still took me over 12 hours with the rest of the stuff I had to do. There's a reason why I don't do weekly vizzes.
- Because I focused on production, not perfection, I was more open to using chart types I don't normally use (looking at you, tree map).
- I loved learning about a way to do a calculated field to blend text and a data item! So even if the vizzes aren't award winning, this challenge is a win in my books!
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