Always learning is a good thing. Here I’m learning a bit more about Vizology with each post, I hope you are as well. And I’m learning on the blogging – how many little viz things go into a viz(so lots of updates) and today how things can get ahead of myself. In my excitement to have the Tableau viz’s up and how much fun they are to do, it seems I missed a step in the build my tracker story.
First, the colours. If you recall back before the BANs post, I talked about a waffle chart to track my posting process, that it showed orange and blue squares for viz and blog posts. I also said colour is important, which is true, What is next, step 2 if you like, is to use the colours and formats better to see.
I do love the default Tableau colours, they are good for differentiation, they have more experts than just me making them, are well thought out for the colour blind and they make it easy for me to see where a chart or dashboard was done in Tableau. But if we are honest, the blue and orange are a little strong. And I’m not really tracking on what type of post I make – the effort is to get me posting enough. So perhaps it can improve, which is what I did in version 2. What did I do to make it a bit more eye grabbing?
- Custom Palette: Default is great, having your own colours better. So I applied one of the schemes I like in Tableau to my viz. Better for my eyeballs, gives a bit of constancy and branding for me and helps the viz stand out.
- Both Blog and Viz posted to Green: Green is good, posting is good, and I want to be positive in the achievements. Both are now the same colour, which actually tracks the data I want – 36 posts. Not how many of each.
- Less chart junk: Removed a few of the background lines on the waffle chart to tidy up, make it friendly on the eyeballs. More on this in the future, for now you can check out a video from one of my DataViz Heroes Datasaurus Rex
- Grey for the undone: The incomplete items are not the focus, so I turned them to a light shade of grey. You can still see the part to the whole view of the waffle chart, just now the focus is on the good (done) part
With those changes, how does it look?
Hope you agree that looks a lot better than version 1.
As to what did I learn about blogging? Well, perhaps I need a better editorial plan for the posts. I’ll admit to being bad at check lists personally and that I keep learning material to post as I’m in the flow of making a viz or post so its hard to know the full plan with I start out. But a plan that forms or gets amended in my head has the weakness of staying in my head and thus getting lost in the flow. As in this case, I got so excited with the final form I jumped a step. So my take away from this post – write down somehow (mindmaps I’m thinking of you) all that I want to say for a Viz series so I don’t jump ahead too often.
I can’t promise perfection, I can promise to learn and be better. Wish me luck.
Vizology 