Blog | Visual Cinnamon

Charting Our Adventures: How I Created a Personalized Map with R, JavaScript, and more

Posted on April 17, 2023

In this blog, I’d like to show you how I created the map below of Senja, Lofoten & Vesterålen in Norway. Using a combination of tools, including the OpenStreetMap API, Amazon Web Services Terrain Tiles, R, d3.js, and JavaScript, I was able to create a unique and personal map that features …

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Learning Data Visualization

Here I share more information about how I got into data visualization, what my current work process is like, and my personal tips on things that have worked well for me to get a career in visualizing data.

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Dataviz Books Reviews

One of the first things I did after throwing myself into data visualization was to read lots of books about best practices. Here you can find reviews that I've written on each of the books. Hopefully it will help you decide which book to read.

Want to learn how to take your data visualization beyond the default?

You can take my 'Customizing Charts for Beauty & Impact' course, in which I share my favorite techniques to go beyond the default to create beautiful, effective, and custom data visualizations.

Check out the course on Skillshare!

Design & Personal
My Experience & Projects from Studying at Fab Academy and Learning How to be a Maker
Posted on July 11, 2021
In September 2020 I decided to stop working for the first half year of 2021 and go back to studying. I had just applied for the Fab Academy, a globally run, full-time course of 20 weeks, headed by Neil Gershenfeld from MIT, focused on learning how to become a maker / fabricator. Making designs on a computer and then turning these into a reality with machines such as laser cutters, 3D printers, milling machines, and more, while also incorporating electronics. It’s also known as “How to Make (almost) Anything”.
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Design & Data Art
Data art posters about music (streaming) data for Sony Music
Posted on September 21, 2020
In April, Sony Music Entertainment reached out to me with a really interesting project idea. When a single or album sells more than a certain amount of units they become a gold or platinum record. The artist generally receives a framed vinyl or CD. But in these days of data being tracked everywhere and listening to music online, could I develop a more data art inspired version of a gold record using data from the actual streams, charts and the song itself. Well, that sounded like an amazingly fun project to sink my teeth into so I enthusiastically agreed!
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Design & Static
A sky map of the Hubble Space Telescope's observations
Posted on April 8, 2020
In celebration of the Hubble Space Telescope’s 30-year anniversary in April 2020 I created an extensive visualization, more of fully-fledged poster really, for Physics Today. Let me show you how the static visuals that I made still became one of the biggest projects I’ve ever worked on in terms of hours invested. I could’ve called this blog post “the impact of small design choices” because the main issue wasn’t necessarily what type of chart form to use. It was really how to display the datapoints (Hubble’s observations) in the chosen chart form (a map of the sky) to reveal both details and the bigger picture.
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Design & Static
Visualizing the different astronomy targets that Hubble has observed
Posted on April 8, 2020
Besides a visualization that plotted Hubble’s observation on a map in the sky, I created another dataviz for Physics Today to celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 30 year anniversary in April 2020. Revealing the types of astronomy targets that Hubble has been looking at. In this design blog I’ll take you through the design process that led to the final visual.
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Tutorial & D3.js
Techniques for Data Visualization on both Mobile & Desktop
Posted on April 17, 2019
For me making a data visualization look good and be effective on both mobile and desktop is one of the most difficult aspects of my work (next to browser bugs, implementing interactivity and optimizing performance). Although there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution I have found several different options across past projects that work for me.
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Design & D3.js
The Design Process of “Why Do Cats & Dogs ...?”
Posted on April 11, 2019
On April 11th 2019, the US National Pet day I released a dataviz driven exploration in collaboration with Google Trends. It went into the questions that people ask on Google to understand their cats and dogs better. In this blog I’ll be taking you through the long and windy design and creation process of the months before the release.
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Design & Static
Creating the Scientific American “Baby Spike” visual
Posted on October 31, 2017
On the Graphic Science page of the July edition of Scientific American you could find three large circular charts about when babies are born. In this blog, let me take you along on the data & designs process that me, Zan Armstrong & Jen Christiansen went through to create this piece.
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