Draw The Rest Of The Chart

Imposter Syndrome and Leveling Up in Data Visualization

Is It Ever Gonna Be Enough?

A bright, energetic consultant stares intently at Microsoft PowerPoint. This hero, inexperienced but devoted, hears a door open nearby. A boss approaches.

The boss sits down and asks to see our hero’s latest wireframe for a potential dashboard to sell to a middle-management client. Upon looking at the PowerPoint slide for about five seconds, the boss tells our hero that he doesn’t know how to explain what he asked for any better, but whatever he’s looking at, this isn’t it.

The boss turns to a workstation right behind the hero and pulls up a news website. Right there, beyond the boss’s pointed finger, the hero sees an article published by a major news journal that includes a series of advanced charts. Animated bar charts race against each other in one frame. In another, balls fly across the screen into little bins to represent potential outcomes. The charts all require a high degree of experience to generate.

The boss stands up. “Make it look like this.” He leaves.

The hero only stares. The article uses charts and algorithms that our hero has never seen before. The hero’s preferred software or language won’t even make some of them…