2026-11-05 00:39:39
It was a super nice surprise to discover that my ‘Seinfeld Chronicles‘ data viz project had received a generous mention on the latest ‘Acquired‘ podcast.
Hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, each Acquired episode involves a very well-researched, long-form (4 hour!) deep dive into a “single company’s history from its founding until today” with the aim of uncovering how each company was so successful in contrast to others.
In something of a departure from their typical ‘companies’ of focus, such as Disney or Ferrari, they recently released an episode dedicated to the US sitcom, Seinfeld.
"Seinfeld, which ended three decades ago, has been watched by 72 million Americans so far THIS YEAR. Behind that incredible stat is an equally incredible business story: obsessive creators, perfect market timing, an ownership structure that aligned incentives for the long term… all of which created a sitcom that became number one by breaking all the rules."
During the final part of the episode, in a section titled ‘carve outs’ which is an informal post-script to topic of conversation whereby the hosts share specific “related books, movies, gadgets, articles, or cultural finds”, Ben Gilbert was very kind to describe his discovering of my original, limited-edition printed version of the Seinfeld data exploration, created in 2020.
You can hear the section in the bookmarked video clip below (from 3h43m onwards).
Alternatively, here’s a few captioned screenshots from the related Netflix episode to give you the gist of how the project was covered…
My sincere thanks to Ben and David for the delightful mention and for linking to the full digital version of the project on their episode page. (And sorry to disappoint those keen people who have been in touch, as a result, seeking to get a copy – ANY COPY! – of the book, here’s the web viewer version of it at least)
The post A nice mention on the ‘Acquired’ podcast! appeared first on Data Viz Excellence, Everywhere.
2026-11-03 19:33:31
Welcome to the latest issue of the Visualising Data Newsletter, chronicling the most insightful and delightful data viz content.
Each month I collect, curate, and publish a collection of the best, most interesting, and thought-provoking data visualisation-related works I’ve encountered since the last issue. This latest collection relates to content I came across since August 2026.
Whether you are working on a dataviz, working in dataviz, or even working towards working in dataviz, you’ll hopefully find sources of inspiration and information. If you want to dive in deeper, browse through all previous issues on my Newsletter page.
To sign up for emailed notifications when each issue is published, subscribe here.
Happy Viz’ing!
Andy
Some new stuff, recent posts or announcements relating to my professional services.
In a couple of weeks I have the distinct pleasure of reforming with my esteemed peers, Valentina D’Efilippo and Stefanie Posavec, to deliver a one-off online training course ‘The Visual Design of Data’. This will be run across 4 x four hour live sessions (17, 19, 24 and 26 November), with each of us taking a session individually before coming together for a final exercise activity to wrap all the learning together. Only a few places remain! Visit Graphic Hunters for more details and how to register.
Early in 2027 I will be running a 2-day ‘Masterclass in Data Visualisation’ training event, also taking place at Flourish HQ in London, over Tuesday 2nd and Wednesday 3rd February. Visit the course page for details about the course, the pricing, and information about how to register.
Some of the freshest data visualisation, visual journalism, or generally inspirational design works or collections.
From beeswarm charts, through connected scatter plots, on to arrow maps and misty wildfire maps, this piece is packed with exquisite data representation methods by Gus Wezerek.
The title does a good job of describing what this about but within the article, which seems to have been a huge graphics-team effort to turn this around so quickly, there’s a perfect blend of visuals covering video clips, photo-imagery, annotated diagrams, maps, and charts to aid the understanding of this tragedy.
In 2013 the original version of this video went viral and represented, at the time, one of the most powerful cases for storytelling with visuals. 13 years later, here’s an updated version from the same original creator, the enigmatically named ‘Politizane’. Beyond this update, there are a further four video
Really elegant interactive relief map for exploring the terrain of the world.
Webernaut is a “small independent site for discovering interesting corners of the web” and includes a collection focused on data visualisation: interactive maps, visual explainers etc. which offers a nice growing resource of notable works in a single browsable place.
Really like the opening visuals that take real money away from an initial stack of cash representing a typical budget. Rather than abstracting the subject using (for example) stacked bar charts using images of Australian notes adds a layer of relatability.
Sound on for this lovely experiment by Josh Wolk. “Every dot is a real subway train. Eight hundred of them, give or take, form a small jazz combo (walking bass, piano, sax, vibes, brushes) that has been playing without pause for over a hundred years. On the platforms they are hot, screaming, full of complaint. This is the music inside the noise.”
Some of the latest articles, interviews, or videos about data viz or related matters.
I’m becoming ever more inclined to drift away from contributing to and obsessing over social platforms, and instead return to enjoying the web as it once was – more about visiting and discovering independent websites. Its always good to give a nudge to potentially new audiences to visit some of the OG data viz places, and so this month let me highlight Kaiser Fung’s long-standing Junk Charts site and his frequent smart observations about ways to refine visuals, that we can all learn so much from.
An exciting announcement to hear that the Information+ Conference – I might argue for it being the best on the data viz circuit – is scheduled to run in Milan over 7-9 June 2027. I’m definitely going to be there.
With the 25th anniversary of September 11th landing during this period, here’s a photographic essay from Jonathan tracing his life through those 25 years since 9/11: “I became a journalist, got leukemia, raised two children and took more than 30,000 photographs of New York City after 9/11.”
Came across this via Nathan Yau, “Relive some of your favorite classic game franchises in a whole new way with Hand-Drawn Game Guides free fan art filled PDF guides”
‘Line’ a fun tool to create your own pottery family based on a single curve: “Draw the curve, Line generates a whole family of proportional vessels, ready to export at real scale (SVG/PDF/STL). Free, in the browser.”
Read the exec summary and then access (for members) the full report to learn about the current trends in the data viz field.
The post The Visualising Data Newsletter – Issue #27, October 2026 appeared first on Data Viz Excellence, Everywhere.
2026-10-12 22:08:45
I’m happy to announce details of a new public training course: A two-day classroom-based ‘Masterclass in Data Visualisation‘ will take place in London on Tuesday 2nd and Wednesday 3rd February 2027 and is hosted by the wonderful people at Flourish.
This is an essential non-technical course for anyone seeking to develop a sophisticated understanding about the effective visual communication of data.
You can read more information about my training courses, which have been running since November 2011. Further public training events, virtual and classroom, will be arranged in response to demand and schedule availability. If your organisation would be interested in exploring options to arrange a training privately for your colleagues, just get in touch.
What is this training about?
This Masterclass training course provides attendees with a sophisticated understanding of how to communicate data visually in the most impactive way. Delivered over two full-day sessions this training de-constructs this complex, multi-disciplinary craft into an organised sequence of topics towards giving attendees a thorough appreciation of how to navigate through the many creative, editorial, and analytical options that exist.
In contrast to the shorter ‘Fundamentals of Data Visualisation’ training, also offered by Andy Kirk, this course has more breadth and more detail, including additional topics not covered in the shorter course and with more time to allow for opportunities to practice the learning on exercise activities.
Who is this training for?
This training is relevant to anyone who has a role in or undertakes duties involving the analysis, presentation, and communication of data. Whether your work is primarily concerned with building dashboards, creating infographics, constructing data stories, or producing charts for reports, its all part of the same world. This popular course will enlighten you with new ideas and approaches for visualising data in the most contextually-reasoned way.
Please note this is not technical training: you will not receive teaching in the form of instruction based tutorials for how to make charts in specific tools. However, you will learn more about the profile of common tools that are being used in the field today, about the opportunities where collaborating with AI capabilities can be potentially useful, and you will be pointed towards many useful online references to help you develop your technical skills to apply what you learn in the course.
For more information about the course contents and objectives visit the training page where you will also find a selection of testimonials from previous attendees.
Who is this training delivered by?
Andy Kirk is an independent data visualisation expert from the UK and now based in Ireland. He is one of the most in-demand, experienced, and prolific educators in the field, having delivered nearly 450 public and private training courses since becoming a freelance professional in 2010. Visit Andy’s website, visualisingdata.com, to learn more about his training experiences as well as his other work in visualisation design, consultancy, lecturing, and book authoring.
Where will this training be held?
This course will be held at Bersey Warehouse, a premise on the London campus of Canva, located at 293 Old Street on the corner with Coronet Street in the Hoxton area (postcode: EC1V 9LA). This is about 6-8 minutes walk from Old Street underground station. Specific arrival instructions will be provided to all attendees priort to the course.
Hot/cold drinks and snack refreshments will be available throughout the day and an optional lunch will also be provided. The venue is also closely located to many cafes and sandwich shop options.
Timings
On both days this training commences at 9:30am and finishes around 4:30pm. Arrival will be open from 9am onwards. There will be breaks during all morning and afternoon sessions, and a lunch break each day of around 60 minutes.
Technology
Attendees are requested to bring a laptop to use as a workspace for the session. The event is not technical in nature but this will enable you to access the course materials and exercise files referred to during the sessions. You will not require any specialist software beyond Excel/Sheets, a pdf reader, and a browser. Across a day you should expect to need around 3 hours of charge. Power access will be provided for charging devices.
The online whiteboard platform, Miro, will be used extensively during the course to collate and share exercise activities. More details will be provided in the class. Other than using a browser and a pdf reader, no additional tools will be necessary to have access to or skills with for this non-technical course.
Training materials will be issued digitally, including the teaching slides, exercise files and further useful resources, and delegates will receive instructions and information about this prior to the course resources. OneDrive, as a first preference, or WeTransfer, as an alternative, will be the typical methods used for material sharing.
Registration
Registration can be made online using the built-in Eventbrite payment processing system. Click on ‘Get Tickets’, choose the relevant ticket option, and then follow the instructions to complete the delegate registration and payment details.
If you would prefer to register offline and arrange payment via an invoice process for electronic transfer just email [email protected] to reserve your place and progress your registration.
Pricing: Fees, VAT charges, and Discounts!
The standard registration pricing for this course is £700+VAT per person. The total cost will depend on any additional processing fees, your VAT exemption status, and the application of potential discounts.
VAT charges are relevant to the following types of buyer:
VAT charges are exempt for the following types of buyer:
There are FOUR ways of joining this course at a reduced price…
(1) Subscribers to Andy Kirk’s Visualising Data Newsletter will find a promo code for a 10% discount mentioned in each monthly issue.
(2) Do you own a copy of the ‘Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data Driven Design‘ book (any edition)? If you do there is a 10% discount available when using the promo code which is the full name of the final chart type in the gallery of methods presented in the book’s sixth chapter. The same final ‘chart’ is listed is all editions of the book. Removing the space, the code should be 7 characters in length.
To apply this discount, when you get to the training registration checkout, in the ‘Promo code’ box enter the code (not case sensitive) and this will reduce the price by 10%.
(3) Eventbrite charges a non-refundable processing fee of ~8% which applies to all registration types. To avoid incurring these additional charges you may instead choose to register offline and arrange payment via an invoice process for electronic transfer. If you/your organisation prefer this method please just email [email protected] to reserve your place and progress your registration.
(4) For some people interested in attending such training, finances can be a barrier. Whether it is due to the relative cost of living in your region or specific personal circumstances, it is entirely appreciated that financial obstacles will exist for some. As a commitment to widening access to these training courses, at least 2 places will be made available on this course, no questions asked, at a discounted ‘pay what you can afford’ basis.
If you would benefit from and feel you would qualify to take one of these available places please email [email protected] to make the necessary arrangements for your registration (ie. this may entail being issued with a discount code to apply to a standard registration procedure).
Cancellations and changes policy
Full refunds (less the non-refundable Eventbrite processing fees ~8%) are offered for any delegate cancellations made up to 7 days before the course start date. Please email [email protected] if this situation arises.
Cancellations made during the 7 days prior to the course starting will be offered a 50% refund (less processing fees), as it becomes much harder to fill a space vacated with such short notice.
Registrations can be switched to a different attendee. Please email [email protected] if this situation arises.
In the rare event the course itself has to be cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances all attendees will be offered a choice of a full refund (excluding processing fees) OR the opportunity to attend an alternative training course in the future. Refunds will be limited to registration costs alone, Visualising Data Ltd is not liable for any other costs incurred.
The post New Course: ‘Masterclass in Data Visualisation’ (London, Feb 2027) appeared first on Data Viz Excellence, Everywhere.
2026-09-11 22:19:41
My August newsletter, issue number 26, that was sent out to subscribers a couple of weeks ago, is now open for all to read.
You can also access this issue, as well as visit the full catalogue of previous issues, via the Newsletter page.
If you’re not already a subscriber, its time to change that! To receive this free monthly newsletter straight into your inbox you can sign up here or visit the Newsletter page to get a bit more background information and instructions.
Thank you as always to everyone who subscribes, reads, shares, visits and responds to this newsletter. But above all thank you to all the people doing ace work that I’m able to curate and share through these issues.
The post The August 2026 newsletter is now open to all appeared first on Data Viz Excellence, Everywhere.
2026-08-19 18:16:20
My July newsletter, issue number 25, that was sent out to subscribers a couple of weeks ago, is now open for all to read.
You can also access this issue, as well as visit the full catalogue of previous issues, via the Newsletter page.
If you’re not already a subscriber, its time to change that! To receive this free monthly newsletter straight into your inbox you can sign up here or visit the Newsletter page to get a bit more background information and instructions.
Thank you as always to everyone who subscribes, reads, shares, visits and responds to this newsletter. But above all thank you to all the people doing ace work that I’m able to curate and share through these issues.
The post The July 2026 newsletter is now open to all appeared first on Data Viz Excellence, Everywhere.
2026-08-11 20:08:32
Earlier this summer I embarked on an outside-of-work project to bring a bit of colour to a blank garden wall. Other than brightening up a part of the garden that spends most of the day in shade, it was also a nice opportunity for some analogue creativity and to briefly, if not entirely, get away from tech.
Here’s the wall in question in its original state.
Since we moved into our new house in December I’d been thinking about what to do with this wall.
It was such a tempting blank canvas, rich in potential to have something creative done to it. I knew it was unlikely to be a place where we grew stuff up it (there’s an opposite white wall in full sun where that can happen) but I knew just whitewashing it wouldn’t be enough.
That said, whitewashing was the first stage, along with some filling and removing of some wall fixtures. Here’s the before-and-after shot…
…but I know you probably want the timelapse of the whitewashing. Of course you do, its always very satisfying. This was done on Bank Holiday Monday, May 4th.
The canvas was prepared, but what to do with it?
In my previous apartment in Dublin city centre I lived near an amazing stretch of street art on South Dock Road, along the River Dodder. I’ve always fancied having a go at spray painting and seeing the artists down there doing what they do was simultaneously inspiring but also cautioning. As much as I’d like to give it a go, without the talent and experience I knew it would be the wrong thing to try for this project. Another time maybe.
Beyond the choice of material, in terms of the creative ‘subject’ I also knew that to attempt something figurative would be high-risk: unless it was perfectly executed it would look rubbish and would be misaligned stylistically with the garden setting. Sure, I could always CTRL-Z by whitewashing but I didn’t want to waste my time.
Although I flirted with the idea, I quickly rejected any pursuit of a data-driven creation. I wanted to be a bit freer than that would afford and I also sought some clear water with the day job.
I settled on pursuing something that would be abstract and geometric in nature. I let my brain relax into waiting for something compelling to come to mind and one night I had a vision of a rectangular grid of squares overlaid with concentric rings. I don’t know why, it just popped up in my mind. I wrote down my idea on my phone’s Notes app then drew it out in Illustrator in the morning. I immediately had that inner feeling that here was something I could work with.
The dimensions of the wall space were approx 6 metres in length and 2 metres in height, which was a neat aspect to work within. I adjusted the initial outline sketch to match those dimensions making the overall pattern more rectangular. I also adjusted the layout to find the right harmony for the numbers of rings, the most elegant positioning of each circle’s origin, and the ideal grid-cell dimensions.
But what would I do with this outline pattern? How would I fill it? With what colours would I paint it?
I initially considered a blend of filling isolated cells and then combining others into continuous shapes. I wanted to use a range of colours but I needed some theme to work towards and maybe some rules to work within.
To help experiment with different options I exported from Illustrator an SVG of my final pattern and then used Claude AI to build a little tool to isolate all the pattern’s individual cell regions and fill them with different colours, drawing from a set of predefined palettes as well as the flexibility to customise my own.
I was getting closer to finding the answer. I extended the tool to allow modifications to the pattern’s stroke colour and width and, above all, introduced an optimised layout rule whereby no cell would be filled in the same colour as a directly adjacent cell. This would help me determine the required number of distinct colours. I added a feature to save generated custom palettes and to export the resulting patterns as png/svg images. With that I also included the option to add a numeric colour label so that I would be able to follow a ‘paint by numbers’ approach when executing it on the wall.
Although I had liked the burst of bright rich colours offered by some of the palettes, the choice of these colours was arbitrary. I wanted something a bit more meaningful, or at least a bit more deliberate.
As I was thinking more about the pattern, I started seeing it as being an abstract depiction of ripples in water. Maybe the movement of water when you are in a swimming pool looking down at its tiled floor. This ‘water’ theme was also relevant given about 600m (as the crow flies) beyond the wall I was painting on are the waters of Dublin bay.
I liked this idea, focusing on different variations of one primary hue (blue) with a single accent colour (gold). I was still unsure whether to actively paint the outline strokes of each region but I was clear that, though the tool was generating patterns based on a full rectangle, I was going to ignore the corners and have rounded edges.
Having worked out the design wireframe and paint-filling approach, I had to choose my paint material. I did some research into the most robust exterior paint types (the wall is exposed to Ireland’s climate, after all) as well as considered which range would offer me the widest variety of colour options AND be available in the right volume quantities. I didn’t want to invest in huge 2L/5L tubs of different paint colours if I was only going to need to use small amounts of each.
The best option came with B&Q’s ‘Valspar’ paints, specifically their exterior masonry range. Not only could I pick from a huge range of colours I could also get 236ml tester pots of my chosen colours for €7. Having established I would need six different colour paints, I calculated how much surface area each colour was expected to cover. I ordered two tester pots for each (the ‘gold’ colour was sourced from another paint specialist), giving me just enough to do one coat with a bit of spare paint leftover for future touch-ups.
It was time to start. With my pattern guide printed I plotted out the design’s real-world dimensions and got to work on drawing it up on to the wall.
With the wall’s surface being far more lumpy-and-bumpy than I’d realised I decided to use a dry-wipe marker pen to draw out the pattern (this was a mistake as it turns out dry-wipe pen plus rain equals goodbye drawing. Who knew?). With a metre rule, set square, and spirit level I created the outline grid.
To form the circles I used a simple method of string attached to the circle origin at one end and to the pen at the other and drew out the arcs, extending the string length by a grid’s-width each time.
I then marked out all the cells that would be taking the first of my blue colours, using my paint-by-numbers guide to put little blobs of colour in each relevant region.
The most challenging aspect of doing the painting was coping with the wall’s uneven nature. Not only was the wall not uniformly flat or straight throughout, the surface would be best described as being akin to painting on a giant poppadom. Because of this it took far longer and far more effort to complete each cell as accurately as I could manage without losing my marbles. This was made harder by the deteriorating outlines of the pattern during what was becoming quite a wet month of May.
Despite that, progress continued…
By the end of May I had managed to get through filling in all the regions for all four of the blues.
Next up, the hugely satisfying addition of the gold paint. The final colour to add.
Until finally, belatedly after a few weeks break due to bad weather and holidays, by mid-June I applied the final touches using a gold-ink pen for the tiny little regions that were too fiddly for the paint brush.
And there we have it. Took a few weeks in the end because it was only possible to make occasional progress. I reckon if I’d been working on it continuously and without weather interruptions it would have taken a full working week. I’m not sure I would have had the patience though to do it so relentlessly like that.
The post My summer side quest appeared first on Data Viz Excellence, Everywhere.
