The other day, while browsing Medium over lunch, I stumbled upon yet another article that explains why designers should/should not pursue a certain activity other than design. This one was called “Designers shouldn’t code. They should study business.”, and its author argues that designers were better off “reading over the Q1 projections and finding out that the key initiatives for the quarter have nothing to do with refactoring your CSS”.

While I agree with the title’s second sentence, the first one got me sitting down and spending another lunch break to put together a response to this claim. …

Update 8 Jul 2017: I’ve created a GitHub repository, where you can check out the code example below. The actual demo can be found here.

Over the past couple of years, D3, the groundbreaking JavaScript library for data-driven document manipulation developed by Mike Bostock, has become the Swiss Army knife of web-based data visualization. However, talking to other designers or developers who use D3 in their projects, I noticed that one of the core concepts of it remains somewhat obscure and is often referred to as »D3’s magic«: Data joins and selections.

Given a solid command of basic JavaScript, this article should help you to wrap your head around these two fundamental concepts and get you started using D3 for your dataviz projects. …