Here’s the background: I am an art history major whose hobby is to collect interior design and craft project pins on Pinterest, as well as a marketing and branding enthusiast who holds certificates in market research and marketing with concentration in social media and web analytics. I am highly design-and-user experience oriented and analytical, and I love to teach and explain the concepts in a visual manner. That has led me to become an aspiring brand designer and a creative director whose forte is in strategic and analytical background. That being said, I am not a designer, or at least yet. Working as a marketing strategist and brand manager in a number of startups with great ideas and lack of manpower, I’ve taught myself how to use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Muse, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, and even Microsoft Office Publisher to create images and concepts that are vivid in my head into tangible works. It takes a great deal of time and frustration for a strategist to deal with highly detail-oriented design works, and that’s the reason Data + Design grabbed my attention like no other.
The concept of learning data visualization is fascinating. With an ever-growing amount of data, there is a necessity to fill the gap between collecting and analyzing the data and explaining and creating results with it. As complicated as data can be, backed with statistical sources full of numbers and graphs, the most efficient way to explain it has been visualization of the data and information such as infographics and interactive web design. Based on my personal experiences, the communication gap between data collectors and graphic designers is often too large, leaving both parties in assurance that they belong in the opposite poles of the world, lost in translation. Data + Design in collaboration with Infoactive (whose landing page had an error and I couldn’t conduct a research on) provides simple steps of collecting and analyzing data and building a visual summary of it, which will be a quintessential guide to any data scientists or designers alike; and its format as an open source site and the growing size of the community only proves the need for the combination of data and visual sources in today’s world.
Reference:
Data + Design: A Simple Introduction to Preparing and Visualizing Information