It is important to discover people who are successfully creating innovative data visualisations. With a variety of platforms available to visualise data, there are an increasing amount of possibilities with how you can present your visualisations. Here are three important names in data visualisation, and why it’s important to know about them!
Caroline Beavon
Caroline Beavon works with data journalism, infographics and visualisations. She works with a variety of companies making their data accessible to the public, which often used for PR purposes.
What makes Caroline interesting is that she designs all her graphics in an ‘illustrative’, hand drawn way, focussing on the design elements. She uses Tableau and Illustrator to create beautiful infographics and data visualisation that is truly graphically unique.
Caroline came to talk at a session for my course. We had a little chat, and she reassured me that she wasn’t the biggest maths fan either – but to her it was about the design elements and seeing the story in the data once the spreadsheets were clean and presented to her. It really inspired me to get started with my data visualisation and stop stressing over my lack of Excel and maths skills and just dive in!
Follow on Twitter: @CarolineBeavon
Christine Oliver
Christine Oliver is a graphic artist for The Guardian, and her work features prominently on the Datablog. Christine studied Newspaper Design and Information Graphics as a HND before she began to work as a freelance artist for a variety of newspapers. Six years ago, she started working for the Guardian.
Christine’s graphics are interesting because mostly they are interactive. The innovative family breakdown putting a face to the children working in poverty in Syria is incredibly powerful, and an interesting way of using simple interactive photography to tell a moving story. Some graphics are illustrative, and of the infographic variety. This detailed breakdown of Greenhouse Gas emissions from the UK is both informative and visually interesting.
Bard Edlund @edlundart
I first discovered Bard Edlund when I came across this article detailing his innovative data visualisation of the 2013 stock market… to a reggae song! I was so curious about how this could work that I had to give the video a watch. It was definitely inspiring to see how a bit of out-of-the-box thinking can produce something so engaging from what could be a very boring visualisation.
Bard works as a freelance designer based in New York. He has worked on a variety of projects in many mediums, often incorporating animated film into his visualisations. Due to the high quality visuals of his work, his visualisations have a tendency to go viral. Bard doesn’t work exclusively with data, and his creative personality extends to working with film (he’s currently working on a music video). It’s interesting to see the array of different visualisations he has created by experimenting with different mediums.
Follow on Twitter: @edlundart
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