How Self-Employed Data Visualization Designers Make a Living
Interviewing RJ Andrews, Alli Torban, Matt Baker, and Ann K. Emery on how they started—and made—their careers in data visualization
I hit a point in my life where I could take my career in countless directions. I left my job in the summer of 2019 and began my venture as a freelancer. I work part-time as a social media strategist while I develop my career in data visualization design. At the end of 2019, I wrapped up a dataviz contract and I started to have doubts. I wasn’t sure if I was any good in this line of work and didn’t know how I could contribute to it. I wasn’t sure how to make this work. I didn’t have the answer to these questions, and I was getting nowhere ruminating. There were two encounters in the new year that helped me turn rumination into something productive. The first was coming across a Ted Talk by psychologist Guy Winch, he offered a way of dealing with rumination. The goal is to transform these thoughts into problems that can be solved:
“To convert [the thought] into a productive one, you have to pose it as a problem to be solved. The problem-solving version of ‘I have so much work to do’ is a scheduling question. ‘Where in my schedule can I fit the tasks that are troubling me?’”
