As this site enters its 7th year I’ve got a lot of new plans that are gradually developing in the background with the singular aim of winning more awards enlightening and inspiring my treasured readers.
DIGITAL BOOK COMPANION
To supplement the release of my book (date TBC but around May/June) I will be publishing further digital content as a companion to the print and ebook. This content will exist in the form of curated further readings, exercises and a detailed step-by-step case-study to support the topics covered in each of the eleven book chapters. Those who buy the print book will get free access to an ebook version that will have direct links to the related contents. However, the material will not be hidden behind a paywall, it will be openly accessible to all.
UPDATED RESOURCES/REFERENCES
The collection of tools and technology arguably represents the most popular content on this site but I need to make sure it is up to date. I already have 300+ tools listed on there but have another 20/30 to review and add. This will be completed in the next few weeks. I also want to check that any references that might have expired are removed. I will also be topping up my references collection of books, data resources and educational programmes in this field. I expect I will be seeking some assistance from everyone out there to ensure I have a comprehensive state.
CHARTMAKER AUDIT
A project I am particularly excited about will be coming later in the summer. I don’t have a final title for this project just yet so it is nominally called the ‘Chartmaker Audit’. This will be an attempt to bridge a knowledge gap that I find most commonly exists amongst those learning and practicing visualisation: which tools make which charts, which charts can be made by which tools. I’m not going to share too much more at this stage but I hope this will prove to be am immensely useful source of guidance for people.
PROJECTS
I mentioned just there a case-study project. I am working on a project called ‘Filmographics’ which has been deliberately conceived to run alongside the book’s contents to demonstrate the workflow process I write about in practice. This will be released to coincide with the book’s release (possibly just before) and will be accompanied with a deeply detailed process narrative, as mentioned above. Beyond this project, after the book is released I will have some freedom for the first time in 5 years to start working on more publicly visible visualisation projects.
NEW POST SERIES
One of the traps I often fall into, as the editor and author of a blog, is thinking that each new post has to be some deep think-piece. Clearly, my endless list based postings do not suffer from this, but elsewhere, in my own mind at least, I do tend to overly restrict myself from posting smaller, quicker and even simpler items.
It is time to shift my approach. I need to loosen the shackles a bit and pick up the pace with more frequent contributions. Rather than try and wrap everything up in to a profound overarching narrative, I’m going to unleash more bite-sized postings offering morsels of advice, insight or comment.
To achieve this I’m going to structure posts around two main themes:
- Small pieces of isolated advice from the contents of my upcoming book (and from the 10,000s of words that were cut from the final script)
- One-off visualisation examples that showcase a single effective or ineffective design choice. Inspired by Lena Groeger and Dieter Rams, I’m going to present these around the general theme of “The Little of Visualisation Design” (LoVD)