As someone who works at storytelling with data, I'm excited to see the art of storytelling gaining momentum. However, it's crucial to acknowledge a potentially surprising truth: not every dataset, report, or dashboard needs a story.  Understand why you are communicating To assess when a story would be appropriate and useful, it's helpful first to recognize the primary purpose of your communication. Many dashboards and regular reports exist to monitor critical business metrics, providing a comprehensive overview of performance at a glance. Other interactive tools are meant for exploring ke ..read more

    Have you ever opened a package and thought, “Why, on earth, is this so frustrating?!” Recently, I opened a Barbie doll—a birthday gift my daughter gave to a friend who was visiting—and the experience was anything but delightful. Layers of plastic encased in more plastic, secured by an unnecessary number of ties and bands—it felt more like a battle than the unboxing of a toy. Some ties were nearly impossible to cut without damaging the doll—or myself—in the process! Frustrating designs like this don’t just apply to packaging. Similar challenges can arise with graphs and slides. J ..read more

My fellow data storytellers and I have lost count of the number of times we’ve been asked questions like, “What’s the right number of slides to have in your presentation,” “How many graphs should you have on one slide,” or “What’s the right number of words to include on a single page?” I’ve worked with many folks over the years who have quantitative backgrounds, and they tend to crave the reliability of specific numeric guidelines whenever possible. In asking questions like these, people hope, or even expect, that we’ll have prescriptive and undeniable numeric answers foro them. If you do too ..read more

In the world of storytelling with data, our focus is creating graphs and visualizations for a business audience—graphs designed to inform and drive decision-making. Lately, however, I’ve been designing visuals with a very different audience in mind: kids.  In my new book, Daphne Draws Data: A Storytelling with Data Adventure, heroine Daphne helps friends by transforming numbers into problem-solving pictures. For example, underwater she draws a scatterplot to settle a crustacean debate, and in outer space Daphne uses a 100% stacked bar to help aliens manage their fuel. These examples ill ..read more

    Over time, my focus has expanded from perfecting graphs to exploring broader aspects of effective communication. This shift is reflected in my books, particularly in storytelling with you, where I share a number of preparation tactics I use leading up to an important presentation or speaking event. One of my favorites is “walking preparation”—practicing aloud as I walk around my neighborhood. (It works wonders, though I’m sure my neighbors have questions about why I’m so animated when talking to myself!) Earlier this week, I was listening to the Huberman Lab Podcast featuring Dr ..read more

    This article is part of our back-to-basics blog series called what is…?, where we’ll break down some common topics and questions posed to us. We’ve covered much of the content in previous posts, so this series allows us to bring together many disparate resources, creating a single source for your learning. We believe it’s important to take an occasional pulse on foundational knowledge, regardless of where you are in your learning journey. The success of many visualizations is dependent on a solid understanding of basic concepts. So whether you’re learning this for the first time ..read more

Reflecting on my early days at Google, I recall a project that involved analyzing thousands of free-text comments from our internal survey, Googlegeist. The task was straightforward in concept: distill this qualitative data into actionable insights by identifying common themes, categorizing feedback, and quantifying sentiments. But in practice, it was a tedious and time-consuming process, taking countless hours to produce anything meaningful. At the time, we didn’t have effective tools for this. There were options, but they were often clunky, lacked the nuance required to understand context, a ..read more

After Halloween, my social media fills up with pictures of candy graphs. They’re fun, colorful, and a creative way to introduce kids to graphs using physical objects. Candy graphs can show quantities, allow kids to compare categories, and generally make graphs feel approachable. But despite the sweetness, they fall short in a crucial way. Candy graphs may look great on social media—bold, flashy, and neatly arranged. But they’re often meaningless, and sometimes even misleading. For instance, there are more Snickers in the picture above than Reese’s cups, whereas it looks like the opposite is t ..read more

Sometimes, we encounter folks who are reluctant to add words to their data tables or visualizations. This hesitation might stem from having been taught to “let the data speak for itself,” as if data were a wise, all-knowing entity rather than a structured set of measurements. Measurements that, ultimately, are shaped by resource constraints and the choices of others along the way. Occasionally, though, this reluctance tips into something closer to disdain. When it does, it’s often due to a belief that data analysis is a “hard skill,” while communication and presentation are merely “soft skill ..read more

We’ve all heard—or maybe even said—the phrase before, “I’m not a numbers person.” What does this mean? What are the origins of this unfortunate and limiting mindset? I believe it starts young. My latest book, Daphne Draws Data was published earlier this month. I’ve been on the publicity circuit, talking with various people about the book for podcasts, live events, and the like. One line of questions that has come up repeatedly is around when children’s aversion to math begins, and what causes it. I don’t know the answer. I suspect that it is the way that math is typically portrayed in our cult ..read more