Dataviz Universe

You're reading Dataviz Universe, a weekly newsletter about data visualization by Yan Holtz. See all the previous issues here! 👋👋 Last week I was working with a client preparing an important presentation. They had a bunch of interesting but complex data and needed to tell a great story with it, so they asked me for advice. I mentioned a tiny technique I love using. It really resonated with them, so I thought I'd share it here too.Note: it resonated on LinkedIn too! 😵 The overwhelm problem...

A few weeks ago, a reader sent me his dataviz project, asking if it could join my Dataviz Inspiration project. It was great. And it featured something I couldn't stop looking at: an animated Sankey diagram. It got me thinking about how we visualize flows, and where dataviz is heading on the topic. Soooo, that's what today is about! Chart types for flow In case you've never bumped into it: I'm the author of Data To Viz, a classification of chart types built as a decision tree. If you head to...

I'm sure you've already heard about this little thing with a medium impact on our lives: AI. Everyone is busy studying the latest model, sharing their newest skill.md, or trying the latest way to integrate it with R. Well, at least I am! For those of us working on computers, AI has a massive impact on our everyday lives. It's an important and fascinating topic. But there's something I feel nobody talks about much: The love for coding 15 years ago I watched my internship supervisor build a...

Data visualization is the art of turning a dataset into a figure that communicates information as efficiently as possible. We have many shapes at our disposal, and we play with dimensions like position, color, and size to encode this information. But there's one more dimension that, in my opinion, is becoming much more prevalent: Interactivity Since most of the charts we read today live on screens instead of paper, we can use mouse events to bring our charts to life. That's not new....

👋 Hi!One of the most common questions I get is from people wanting to break into data analysis or dataviz, and wondering where to start. It's a tough one to answer. There are so many moving parts, and honestly, I'm not sure I'm the best person to give a definitive answer. What's sure But one thing is obvious to me: you need a way to prove to the world that you can take a project from A to Z and deliver a polished, professional outcome. That's why I always tell people to create a GitHub...

A year ago I sent a LinkedIn message that put me on a train to Berlin. Today I'm opening the doors to the course that came out of it, so I would love to tell you the story! ☺️. R & Data visualization I've loved R and dataviz for a long time. Curating the R graph gallery for the last 10 years has meant I spend a lot of time looking at other people's work, and one name kept coming up: Cédric Scherer. His charts are some of the best out there, genuinely. And all made with ggplot. Here are 4...

👋 Hi! Two weeks ago, I briefly described the 4 levels of AI adoption among data professionals: Note: I actually missed a big category: using agentic AI, with personal customization like config file, skills.md files and more.Many people reached out asking for more information about the last step: agentic AI.It would be a bit long to explain everything in a newsletter. It's actually the exact topic of a full AI module of ggplot2 Uncharted! So today I want to try a new format. I made a short...

👋 Hi! I’m on my way back after spending 3 days with Cédric Scherer, and he made me realize something: the R Graph Gallery is now 10 years old.That feels like the perfect moment to share the story behind it. How it started 10 years ago, I was working as a bioinformatician, studying wheat genomes. The work was fun and it introduced me to the world of programming (without AI 🙂). My favorite part quickly became the end of the pipeline, where months of work turn into a clean chart that tells a...

👋 Hi! Today I want to talk about a very niche topic nobody's discussing: AI. 🙃 All joking aside: I'm deep in prep for my ggplot2 course launch, and I've decided to add a module on the intersection of R, dataviz, and AI. That means lots of research, community conversations, and tool-testing. Along the way, I've identified 4 levels of AI adoption: and I think knowing where you stand can be genuinely useful. 0️⃣ No AI AI is a game-changer, but it comes with real limitations: cost, ethics,...

👋 Hi! In previous emails, I’ve talked a lot about how AI is reshaping data visualization and specifically how it’s pushing people toward powerful tools like D3.js that used to be too hard to learn. Today, I want to flag a new caveat that comes with this shift. The new trend For years, the level of static charts created with R, Python, and other tools has been incredible. As an illustration, check my "best chart" selection for R and Python! But building interactive graphs? That remained...