Data viz resources for hungry designers

Helpful resources for designers interested in data viz

Published in

Domo UX

3 min readJun 5, 2019

I can’t hide the fact that I have a huge appetite for data viz. I’m a UX designer, and other designers new to data viz frequently ask for resources. I’ve got a million and one links and tweets and articles and pins I could send, but usually what they’re looking for falls into the category of “well-designed dashboards.”

Why stick to dashboards, when you can dip your toes into some interesting data storytelling articles, experimental data viz, or even — *gasp* — analog data viz!? There’s a wide creative world out there when you look beyond dashboards. Here’s a quick-start intro into some of my favorite data viz resources.

Turn on the fire hose

Data is Beautiful on Reddit: never ending feed of excellent data viz made by enthusiasts and professionals
Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards: an annual contest for data viz practitioners, which collects the juiciest data viz projects.
Data Visualization Society: join this 🔥🔥🔥 slack group for endless resources, inspo, great articles, and friends!
Data Viz Project by Ferdio: a great resource for exploring different chart types. Once you know the name of the chart type you want, you can image search to your heart’s content.

Books for understanding data viz principles

The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics by Dona M. Wong. This is the fastest read to learn how to not screw things up.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. Great read and intro to data viz, but please don’t make it your bible.
Good Charts by Scott Berinato. Ideal for the business-inclined.
The Functional Art by Alberto Cairo. If you love data viz and are ready to go deeper into the subject, this is your book.
Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. Another good one with business applications in mind.
Dear Data by giorgia lupi and Stephanie Posovec. DREAM TEAM, dream project.

Dashboard inspo

Tableau has a wealth of interesting dashboards.
A quick search on Dribbble or Pinterest is bound to yield beautifully designed dashboards (though often inaccurate or misappropriated charts). Tread carefully.
Nicholas Felton’s Annual Reports. He designed a decade of personal annual reports.
This category is actually really hard to get good examples for, since a lot of dashboards are made for internal use only. If you poke around BI software websites like Tableau, Domo, Qlik, Lucid Charts, Power BI there are some decent out-of-the-box examples.