Shirley Wu is a software engineer who builds data visualizations. She is the creator of many wonderful D3 projects and currently works freelance.
What do a former astronomer and a software engineer have in common? A love for data visualization! Not a joke, but a real thing: Shirley, a developer who loves painting and Pixar animation, will team up with Nadieh Bremer, a data-viz designer with a background in astronomy. Together they will show us how to leverage web technologies like SVG and CSS to achieve stunning visualizations, and how their collaborative project data sketches helped them to explore the possibilities.
data sketch|es: A Visualization a Month
Data sketches is a collaboration between Nadieh and Shirley, where they choose a topic and visualize it by the end of the month. The collaboration started for many reasons: they weren’t creating as many personal data visualization projects, so they were looking for the motivation to make more. They wanted to explore their creativity, to experiment with the tools that are out there, to learn from each other, and to have fun.
In this talk, Shirley and Nadieh will share the lessons they learned while working on data sketches. They will highlight their favorite months of data, sketches, and code: what made them their favorites, the mistakes made along the way, and how they overcame them. They hope that by sharing their visualizations’ humble, ugly duckling beginnings and their many (embarrassing) iterations, that it will inspire others to create their own unique and compelling visualizations.