What's to know about me? Dataviz is honeydukes to my eyes.
In the past months, I started putting my creativity in different places to stretch my comfort zone, and to give myself a little rest from dataviz, so that I can come back full speed when the time feels right again. I also realized that dataviz became such an integral part of my life over the past years that even if I think I’m not doing it, I’m still very much doing it.
This post is my first ever tutorial, and I think I’m more proud of this solution than I should be. But hey, here’s to a thousand more Saturn charts!
Thanks to David Lynch for keeping me wild at heart, I managed to come up with a new visualization after months. I’m super happy I was able to figure out the math behind this one all by myself. This post covers the design part, the next will focus on building the chart.
I turned 34 yesterday, and finally, September 1 was not about letting out the yearly number of cries for not being where I wanted to be. This was a great year, probably the best I’ve had so far. I reached everything I never even thought I would. But I knew from the start that such a quick rise can only result in a quick burnout.
I spent the last couple of days in Vienna with my bike, and it was one of my best decisions lately. I knew I will enjoy it, I just didn’t know I’ll enjoy it this much. To anyone who is considering visiting Vienna: buy your ticket now!
Not another movie-themed viz, right? Sorry, but yes, it is. I was trying out some new design perspectives with my favorite actress Amy Adams, that evolved into an infographic. Click for a handy Illustrator trick!
It’s fair to say that I won’t make a fortune selling prints. However, I promise I’ll buy myself a damn fine cup of coffee and a new book after each order. And if I don’t sell anything ever, I still learned a lot during this process.
There’s a first for everything, so I’m live-blogging my new project from the data collection to the finished viz. I’ll make a diary of my progress and document all the pitfalls, doubts, lousy sketches, ideas that never made it… so tune in for updates. I haven’t been this excited for months!
I never had a taste for classical music, but my grandma had a Bösendorfer since she was a child. This meant that someone from the grandchildren had to play the piano, and I won the family lottery. I had no talents, hated going to music school, but I loved hanging with her and practicing her favorite pieces. I pretended to like playing, and she pretended not to hear how bad I was.
The tooltips might not be what they seem, but they deserve to be beautiful too! Transcend with David Lynch and me into formatting tooltips to set them on fire. I’m not saying it’s not 568% extra work to make them more visually appealing, but I think it worth the effort.
This is a story that was heavily inspired by David Lynch, so hear it from him. “…If they give you the right to make the film, they owe you the right to make it the way you think it should be. The filmmaker should decide on every single element, every single word, every single sound, every single thing going down that highway through time. Otherwise it won’t hold together. The film may suck, but at least you made it suck on your own.”
It was a long time since I enjoyed creating something this much. I’m not encouraging anyone to follow suit on this absolutely worst practice 3D bar chart thingy, but here’s a tutorial just in case.
Sharing is caring, so here come my top 10 favorite graphic artists. I just ordered a couple of signed prints to freshen up my office wall and because it’s important to support arts if we have the means.
I’m lucky enough that never in my life I felt less than a man and experienced no discrimination in any areas of life. I know it’s not the case for all women. Focusing on the negative aspects is always more shocking, but I’m so in for good data vibes.
Wanna know how to become a Tableau Zen Master in less than a year? Yeah, me too. I remember running on the treadmill on March 1, and I was like “what the hell, I’m going to Twitter”. Ever since then, I’m just rolling my head around and keep asking myself if it’s really happening to me.
Have you heard about the “picture superiority effect”? Concepts presented with visuals or pictures are better learned and more easily recalled than those without. Dare to use images, but use them right, and don’t overuse!
My adventures in fontland continue. This time I used Kodak and Helvetica Neue Thin to make my viz pop. Helvetica Neue Thin is such an elegant font, that even Kodak would dress up as Helvetica Neue Thin for the font Golden Globes.
The people close to me know that I have a soft spot for movies. And fonts. And a bunch of other things, but let’s narrow the scope down to the first two.
There are only a few more inspirational toys (if any) for little girls than Barbie. Look at all the jobs she had in the past 50 years. I hope the Data Visualization Designer Barbie is already on its way!
It’s no secret that I’m a walking love letter to Budapest, but I just can’t stop being obsessed with it. Discover all my favorite spots in the hood and see how you can create round-shaped maps in Tableau & Mapbox.
In 2020 I watched 645 hours of movies and series. Yes, that equals 27 days and it’s almost as long as February. 73% of this time I spent watching series – 660 episodes of 62 different ones. My main platform was Netflix (270 hours), closely followed by HBO GO (250 hours), while I only went to the movies 3 times this year due to the lockdown.
I’m not an easy person. I’m fast, loud, rarely satisfied, I have a can-do attitude, but I get bored easily. I’m a whirlwind, and sometimes people feel intimidated by me. I don’t think that someone is right just because he’s above me in the hierarchy, and it’s hard to shut my mouth when I feel suppressed. I had my problems with that attitude, and I felt that this is all my fault, while it was just not the right workplace for me.
Steven Shoemaker dared me to make a map-centered viz. It was like he’s reading into me. I haven’t created a map so far because every time I tried, I realized how much I suck at it. I put a solid 24 hours into this project, and this did not come easy.
I collected all the questions that in a dream world I’d like to get answers to before start building a dashboard. I divided them into four sections (technical setup, purpose, audience, and development) and included a one-pager of the blog post. Without knowing these, for me, it’s just pure luck if I can calculate the effort right.
I proudly present my slowest ever dashboard made with minimum ozone damage and maximum love – out of 4 rows and 3 columns of data.
An unpopular opinion, but I was raised never to feel ashamed of the things I love. So here it is: I love Woody Allen. For me, he’s one of the most talented, intelligent, and funniest people of our century.
Getting back to school is not always fun, but we can make it so. I made a periodic table and added some interesting facts to all the elements to make learning chemistry even sexier than it is!
This was one of those many design-driven visualizations of mine when I knew how the end-result should look like. I just needed to find the data that fits my story. I grew up in one of these panel houses in Hungary, and wouldn’t trade those years for anything.
I love fussing with UI design elements and have a restless curiosity about how I can use them in Tableau. Toggle buttons are my recent crush, read on to see how to make your own.
This is my favorite dataviz topic ever: using layers in Tableau. Check out this tutorial to see how you can make a bar chart work using “only” 4 layers of floating elements, a little Photoshop, and Illustrator.
Somewhere around March at the beginning of quarantine in Hungary, a friend and I started to read Infinite Jest. The book is the thickest and most complicated reads of my life so far, it’s 1100 pages long in a very big format (not only good for reading but weight lifting excercises too) written in 8pt font size. But hey, I like literary challenges!
I was pretty active on Pinterest recently, looking for new inspiration. A couple of weeks ago I came across a series called City Facts. I tried to recreate something similar using Tableau and Illustrator about Budapest.
I tried to come up with some dashboard title variations, to emphasize that titles can be more than big ass letters. There are so many creative ways to make them beautiful, we just have to look at some good UI implementations.
I watched the first episode of Dark last summer, but after being utterly terrified for an hour I decided this is not for the faint-hearted like me. How wrong I was. Some weeks ago I gave it another try, instantly I got hooked on binge-watching and started sketching the network on paper.
Last week I was searching for a photo of Barbie pony and at the back, I saw a terrible drawing hanging on the wall over the bed of my little brother. I wonder how he could fall asleep looking at that every night. Turns out, I had that Addams Family vibe from pretty early on. I told my mom, that it’s okay if she wants to have this tattooed on her arm!
I made a Lady Gaga viz by accident. I’m not a fan of pop music, but she’s just one of the most talented women of our time. I loved her Five Foot Two documentary, she’s just so ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. Her performance in A Star is Born is giving me the goosebumps by even thinking about it.
Nationally approximately 10% of women aged 15 to 49 report having undergone female genital mutilation (FGM) in Tanzania, but prevalence is much higher in the Mara region at 32%.
I just leave this here without any comment. The viz is also available on Tableau Public.
Ken Flerlage made an awesome tutorial on how to create LEGO art in Tableau and I tried it out. One thing I might like better than building LEGOs is binge-watching series, so I combined the two.
I decided to take part in this week’s MakeoverMonday challenge, as the topic was really close to my heart: how has the music industry changed in the past 40 years. The original viz was so great, that I decided to go nuts for donuts with this submission.
Sziget is one of the biggest music festivals in Europe, but this year they will have the lowest number of visitors: none. Due to the coronavirus, all major events have been canceled in Hungary, so no concerts in 2020.
I had my hardships using fonts in Tableau and I’m far from being a typography expert, but here are some suggestions on how to use fonts to avoid the common pitfalls.
During this lockdown, I realized a lot of things. One of them is that I can cook. However, the recipes I try are located on different websites and 2 weeks later I don’t even remember where I saved them. That’s when the idea came to make my cookbook, and if I do it, why not make it in Tableau? Why? Just because it can be done.
I watched the season finale of Westworld yesterday evening and was quite nervous the whole day, as this came out as one of the lowest-rated episodes of the series (correction from this morning: it is the lowest-rated episode of all time).
This is the third (and final?) quarantine life viz after Couchella and My Fallen Kindom, using the same style as these two before. This time I downloaded my bank account info and had a look at how my spending structure has changed in the past months.
I was riding my bike yesterday to the pharmacy to save my head from being exploded when the idea popped into my mind. I’m gonna draw the layout of my flat and make a heatmap of what I’m doing where for how long in the apartment!
I might be as obsessed with this show as Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin with tigers, so I downloaded some search statistics of the main keywords from Google Trends and made a visualization of it.
I can’t believe Modern Family has come to an end after 11 years. I was growing up with this show, and even though the episodes started to get weaker at the end, I still enjoyed every minute of it. Even though I’m a mixture of Claire and Alex, my favorite characters were Phil and Luke… maybe Lily, as she turned out to be quite a savage teenager.
I keep a close watch on what’s happening in UI / UX and graphic design, because the trends in these areas are the trends that can make your dashboards sexy.
Since it’s not safe going out to the post office, here’s my heartfelt message on a Tableau postcard, to all the people in the world!
I’m not okay with this! The weekly Makeover Monday challenge looks at the unpaid working hours by gender and it’s a wake-up call for the society we’re living in. Women are superheroes, it’s a fact!
Data muggle 