Constructing a Career in Dataviz: Finding Success
Promoting your own work is tricky business — in this article learn how to build a portfolio, share your work, and build a supportive community
My father grew up on a farm in rural Kansas. His father and grandfather were both builders, and growing up on the farm, he gained bits and pieces of experience in building. Later, in his teens, my dad helped with an addition to a family house in Crested Butte, Colorado, and afterward, he figured he had some experience, so he applied for a job as a framer, assuring the boss, “Yeah, I know how to frame a house.” His first day on the job the boss strolled over, inspected his work, and told him, “You don’t know crap.” Then he fired him. Sixty years later, my dad recounted this story while sitting inside a house that he built, surrounded by furniture he built, and looking across the street at our neighbor’s house, which he also built. Which is all to say that success rarely comes in a straight or expected path, and often only comes after time and failure (the convergence of the two can, in its totality, be attributed as experience).
My previous two essays on constructing a career in data visualization outlined the key skills for data visualization and how to learn those skills, but what do you actually do…
