Nathan Yau's friendly voice

A bit of ancient history before I get to the point: I began my career in information design—“infographics”, as it’s called in journalism—back in 1997; for more than a decade after that, I designed mostly pictorial explanations of current events: diagrams, illustrations, 3D animations, cutaways, exploded views, and the like.

Around 2009 I decided to sharpen my mapping skills. I began studying thematic cartography through books such as this one and this one; thanks to them, I became aware of my poor understanding of statistics and charts, so I fell into one of those reading rabbit holes that I’ve already mentioned in this newsletter. That’s how I ended up devoting the last 15 years to data visualization.

Back in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s there weren’t many resources to study visualization outside statistics and business analytics; think of Few, Wilkinson, Robbins, Cleveland, Wainer, and the like. Those authors deserve more attention than they get nowadays—much of what you read in recent visualization books is, to a certain extent, a repetition of what they wrote—but their teachings weren’t always applicable to news graphics.

And then I discovered Flowing Data—and what a discovery it was! Its author, Nathan Yau, was (is) a statistician, but had also been an intern at the graphics desk of The New York Times (that’s where we first met,) so he thought and wrote as a journalist. His weblog, full of practical advice and software tutorials, was fun and approachable, and so was his 2010 book, Visualize This. Its second edition has just been launched.

If you enjoyed the first edition of Visualize This, be aware that the second is a different beast—the examples, the software, the code, everything has changed. It’s also a much more cohesive book, both tonally and thematically, which I guess reflects Nathan’s maturation as a writer.

What hasn’t changed is what I so much loved a decade and a half ago, Nathan’s friendly voice. Reading Visualize This felt and still feels like sitting next to an experienced designer while he works at his computer and shares dozens of tips and tricks. It’s a great feeling indeed.

(If you want to learn more about Nathan, Simon and I interviewed him in our podcast a while ago.)

That’s all for today. I leave you with ‘Falling from the Sun’, the latest single of one of my favorite progressive metal bands, Evergrey. Pure energy and technical virtuosity (like Nathan):