One, two, test, test, is this thing one? Hi, it’s me! I’m Lisa. I’ve been working at Datawrapper since 2017 – and wrote some articles about color in data visualization during that time. Because, you know, I was so bad with colors. And I wanted to figure it out myself. And I thought: “If I’m bad with colors, others might be, too.”
All the big articles I wrote for Datawrapper, in fact, were about color. So I thought: “Why not package that to a really nice book about colors?”
And that’s why I’m working on: A book about colors in data vis.
While I’m working on it, I’ll share my process with you.
I’ll use this space here to document my process, often daily. I’ve done so before. I used a Tumblr (is that what it’s called?) to document writing my master’s thesis in 2014, and to document a year in which I did a fellowship. Every day, I asked my myself: On a scale from 1 to 10, how do I judge my input and output? What did I learn today? And what questions still remain?
“What questions remain?” or, even better, “which questions arose?” is a great question to ask every day. This tiny blog here will help me do so.
These daily notes are not polished. (That’s why I like to call them “notes”, not “blog posts”.) They’re not proof-read by my great coworker Rose. They’re not even proof-read by me. They’re just…snippets. Quick thoughts I put out to tell you and me what I worked on and learned today. They’re not the best thoughts. But they’ll come consistently.
So what happened today? I had a meeting with Gregor and David in which we decided that this, this blog, and this book, is what’s going to happen. And I made the first sketches for how this blog could look like.
Open questions: How much work is it to get this platform up and running? And is it worth it? (Time will tell.)