Wrote a longish reply to a message about viz but thought I’d share here for further input.. below are some of my thoughts but please add your own to help people looking to improve their graphics Question: do you know of any good courses/material or just have any advice on how to improve the actual design process of data vis? Not in terms of the actual coding … but how to select the right spacing, colour schemes, fonts, etc…”

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There is so no secret formula. There are no shortcuts (if you think you've found one you'll waste hours and realise there was a simple answer all along). You just have to start from step one, like any language, you need the foundations before you can experiment. Learn the absolute basics first. What are ints, floats, strings, lists, dicts, arrays. LEARN WHAT ERRORS MEAN and how to read where you are getting the error and why. learn how to for loop before you can list comprehension, learn how to while.

Something I've learned over the past few years creating data viz and I've certainly been guilty of: just because you can doesn't mean that you should. And just because you ~can definitely doesn't mean that you should. Two things need to be communicated: The story & so what? For me, creating viz is all about layers. Not metaphoric layers, literally just shapes and shades on top of one another to make something coherent and to show what I want to show. Think about every element you want to include and why.