-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Session 4A: So you want to do vis for a living?
micahstubbs edited this page Nov 27, 2015
·
11 revisions
- Jerome from Uber: d3/vis is much easier to learn than it used to be, it is difficult to find those who are good at making visualizations but also engineering, javascript data manipulation, information design, accessing data (sql)
- Kai freelance: it is important to determine why the project is meaningful to someone. the best potential of vis is to help domain experts see information and modify their own mental model of how something works. Create something quickly, develop iteratively, quickly manipulate information and draw something on the page. Cleaning data is a significant part of many visualization efforts.
- Miles from facebook: diversity of those creating visualizations is valuable to bring different experiences. Take advantage of what part of the aspects needed to create vis you are most experienced in - focus.
- Shirley from Illumio: visualizing data center traffic topology & security management tools. Many people who work with datavis seems to be small self contained projects. At first, vis was just a picture of what is happening. Later, scaling & aggregation for more nodes was needed. Then features were added to use the vis as a tool. A core part of what customers want is to verify what customers have designed is implemented the way they expect.
- Understanding the math and geometry can be more challenging than the code. Tasks will likely require a refresher in trigonometry
- Wucash from Microsoft, PowerBI: become a practitioner of reasoning information. Determine ways to compare information. You can use vis to hook people into a cause, but that's just using vis as a means to an end. Interaction design is important to convey what is necessary, not just clutter information. Development cycles will require maintainable code.
- Training - most self taught
- Where can domain knowledge be important - usually a vis expert needs to find those people to find what they need.
- Micah from Adatao: practice instead of training - creating blocks, small examples are useful to build skills. keep making examples - how do you start? take a visualization and swap the dataset.
- Open data initiatives can provide interesting datasets to motivate yourself.
- Meetups can be useful for feedback on work, show and tell. Share work on twitter. D3 slack group, post what you are working on.
- What flavor of math do you need? All math becomes useful, geometry, trig, statistics. Calculus of continuous space. Pick what you care about.
- Functional programming is a cross section of math and CS
- Tamara: Design study methodology - how can you efficiently transfer information between a domain expert and a vis designer.
- Micah: Typical week working in vis - debugging, getting feedback from UI designers, reserve time to look at other vis projects to see the breadth of what has been done,
- John from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab: a lot of time is spent guessing what a customer wants, communication is highly important. Budget can dictate how much ability you have to try different things.