#SWDchallenge: draw your data
Here at storytelling with data, we are big advocates for starting out with low tech materials before building a final product. White boards, sticky notes, big sheets of paper—all of these are quick and easy for getting a project started. You can experiment, plan out your communication, and consider lots of alternatives before you ever touch a keyboard.
There are more benefits to sketching out graphs than simply finding a quick way to prototype. The physical act of sketching out a graph forces us to think deeply about our data, one that can serve as a sanity check in the design process. Starting out with a sketch also keeps us from getting too attached to our initial ideas—it’s much harder to let go of a graph that isn’t quite panning out when we’ve already spent time building in a tool. Sketching also lets us directly express the purest version of our vision for what we want to show. Instead of being limited by what our tools’ settings, defaults, and capabilities are, we can use the freedom of a pencil and a blank sheet of paper to render what we are seeing in our mind’s eye.
Beyond its benefits in the planning stages, there can also be aesthetic or tonal advantages to sketching our final design. Imagine that you are trying to communicate something whimsical, or something geared towards a younger audience, where you want to make the information feel unthreatening and accessible; or, maybe you want to convey a little more uncertainty than a software-built visual would imply. Presenting hand-drawn visuals may be more successful in those scenarios.
This month, your challenge is simple: sketch a graph. Along with your submission, let us know why you thought sketching was appropriate for that particular instance—whether it was for a specific audience, a particular purpose, just as part of your development process. The merits of sketching are many, and we invite you to take advantage of them this month.
Upload your submission to the community by February 28 at 3PM PT. If there is any specific feedback or input that you would find helpful, include that detail in your commentary.
Here are some related resources to get you going:
The "let's draw!" exercise in the SWD community is a good place to get started with sketching graphs.
Illustrator and friend of SWD Catherine Madden talked with Cole about her creative process.
Catherine also participated in a live podcast with us, called "the power of drawing." You can watch the video or listen to episode #33 of the storytelling with data podcast.
For inspiration, check out some of the following creators and writers:
Mona Chalabi is a data journalist who focuses on using hand-drawn illustration to call attention to social issues in an impactful but accessible way.
Information designers Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec spent a year sending each other weekly postcards, each with a personally-collected and created-by-hand data visualization. The project, which they called Dear Data, eventually became a book, a DIY postcard kit, and the inspiration for a follow-on journal called Observe, Collect, Draw!
Shirley Wu and Nadieh Bremer are creative visual designers who collaborated on a long-running project called Data Sketches, in which they picked a dozen general topics (e.g., "movies," "the Olympics," "travel") and each created a visualization based upon it. While not specifically hand-illustrated, each individual creation exhibits a distinctively organic and vibrant aesthetic, reminiscent of traditional analog art techniqiues. A book collecting their pieces, alongside technical write-ups of their creative processes, is scheduled for a Februrary 2021 release.
While not specifically about data visualization, Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics and Nick Sousanis's graphic novel Unflattening are interesting explicit and implicit explorations (respectively) of how hand-drawn media can be used to enhance, transform, and subvert our traditional ideas of narrative.
