By Alberto Cairo

Hi everyone, welcome to a new era for this newsletter. I hope that you’ll stick around to receive news about the Open Visualization Academy; we’re aiming to launch the first batch of free and open source master classes and tutorials in the last quarter of 2025. Spread the word!

(I write “we” because I’m gathering a great group of collaborators, all experts in information design and data graphics; I can’t disclose who they are yet because we’re still working on some details, but I’ll do so soon. I’m also working with my former student Michela Effendie and a few University of Miami colleagues, such as Vinicius Sueiro, who designed the Academy logo.)

This is what we’re planning:

First, a core introductory course, which I’ll teach. In around four or five hours, I’ll cover the basics of information design and data graphics.

Besides my basics course, you’ll be able to access in-depth master classes, which will vary in duration from a couple of hours to more than five. Here they are (these aren’t final titles):

• Visual and information design

• Applied ethics

• Reading data graphics

• Critical visualization

• History of visualization

• Building narratives with data and charts

• Accessibility

• Generative AI for data design

We’ll also have a few courses that will teach concepts and software:

• R for data preparation, exploration, and design

• Cartography and map design with QGIS

• Dashboard design

And several software tutorials:

• Adobe Illustrator for information design

• FIGMA for prototyping

• RawGraphs

• Flourish

• Datawrapper

Finally, we’re also planning for a series of short videos featuring famous designers explaining the creation process of one of their projects in detail.

This is just the beginning; there’ll be more stuff coming in 2026 and beyond.

The Open Visualization Academy will also host a few in-person conferences. In June we’ll have Outlier, the conference of the Data Visualization Society, VizUM 2025 in November (read our chronicle of the 2024 edition,) and in December we’ll have the Computation + Journalism Symposium. I’ll tell you more about them soon.

We’ll keep you posted through this newsletter, so stay tuned.

Other news

Texty needs our help. If you’ve read any of my books, you know that I’m a big fan of Texty.org.ua, the Ukrainian data and investigative journalism nonprofit. They are asking for some support from their readers. You can send a contribution here; I just did.

The links below will take you to several articles that got my attention recently on Bluesky. There’s some great insights about animation in visualization, thoughts about making data analysis more equitable, monochrome visualizations, and graphics about the Covid-19 pandemic:

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That’s all for now. I leave you with Feeling Good, performed by Nina Simone; Butterflies all havin' fun, you know what I mean: