The tiny little viz challenge

An exercise in visual storytelling

Try it yourself

Post a topical series of visualisations on the social media platform of your choice.

Each piece of work should:

Be clearly insightful and tell a great story
Be suitable for the general public
Be properly optimised for your chosen platform
Be visually consistent - same layout, palette and font every time
Ensure the tool used to build it is not obvious (see 4)

Example of a LinkedIn post by The Economist

Background

I've had a little success with public data visualisation but in truth I was getting sporadic applause amongst other practitioners and almost no interest from a wider audience. I'm also awful at social media and just don't engage enough to build a solid network.

It prompted me to break down what the world's best data journalists do well and challenge myself to replicate it. Could learning from them improve engagement? Could it make me a better storyteller?

They do a lot right.

These teams often have to work at speed, which means they've thought very hard about workflow.

They pay careful attention to channel, which means they often create multiple versions of the same viz for print, online or adjusting to the quirks of each social media platform.

They have strong branding, which means they've establised a clear style guide and follow it to the letter.

Their work is almost always topical and engaging.

And finally, they never talk about tools. You'll never know how they built a visualisation or be able to discern their methodology.

This last part was really important to me. As you progress through a career in analytics, it starts to become clear that your prowess with the tools isn't the objective. In fact technical skill only gets you to the start line.

I used Figma to create a template for all visualisations in the series

Stakeholders want to make decisions based on your analysis, which is when storytelling becomes more important than tooling.

This exercise turned out to be much harder than I first thought. Designing for small spaces requires a relentless focus on simplification.

I've found myself rewriting titles 20 times, been frustrated that I can't use all of my viz arsenal in a tight space and often found this format very constraining.

On the flip side I'm working faster, the messaging is clearer and (most importantly) these cards have had way more engagement than my long form pieces.

There's no doubt it's helped to sharpen my stories and learn to de-clutter.

My progress

I chose to post my creations on LinkedIn, Reddit and occasionally Twitter, which use a square image format (1200 x 1200 pixels). I use a template created in Figma to ensure every piece is consistently sized and styled.

Tools used so far:
Excel, Rawgraphs.io, Tableau, Qlik Sense, QGIS, Sankeymatic, Datawrapper

26 cards created

3,619 public comments

70,767 likes / upvotes / retweets