An historical and evolutionary perspective — Ever since Scottish engineer William Playfair devised the pie chart in his Statistical Breviary (1801) this popular statistical graphic has been praised for its intuitive readability (think of slicing up a cake in ratios), and vehemently criticized for its lack of accuracy. Leland Wilkinson said it best in regards to…

Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge — After 4 long years of research, roughly 2,000 exchanged emails, 50,000+ written words, plenty of sketches and notes, The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge is finally available for pre-order on Amazon (officially out on May 2). You can follow updates on Twitter and Instagram.

10 Years / 1,000 Projects — Ten years ago, precisely on October 9th, 2005, VisualComplexity.com (VC) was born. The website’s launch was announced in the very last entry of my MFA Thesis Diary blog (a collection of research bits pertaining to my graduate thesis project Blogviz), where I stated the following: Finally I has able to…

How we built two brands in two weeks — Codecademy makes it easy for anyone, anywhere to learn how to code. Our online platform is used by millions around the world, who are interested in building programming skills and ultimately getting a tech job. During the past two years, many institutions have joined this movement offering a variety of…

A metaphor on the diversity of visualization — The Great Wave off Kanagawa (神奈川沖浪裏) is one of the most well-known Japanese prints of all time. It’s also a great metaphor for better understanding the diverse nature of data visualization. Created around 1830 by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), The Great Wave is a remarkable example of the ukiyo-e…

The first time I saw Ben Shneiderman’s Treemap Art Project pieces, which he has been producing over the years, was during a visit to the University of Maryland in April 2014, when I gave a lecture on Visualization Metaphors. …

and the battle for white space — After the launch of Codecademy’s redesign on April 23rd, some people reached out to us wondering how we were able to embrace such a clean, minimal interface. …

Our 10 Design Principles — We have recently launched a considerable redesign of Codecademy.com, which you can read about in detail in our blog. Now, we would like to take this opportunity to expand on the main design principles that helped us guide through this 3-month undertaking.