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Steal Like a Data Visualiser
How I recreated a particle orbit in Clojure and improved my animation skills in the process
Improving your data visualisation skills through theft may sound vicious at first, but it is a very effective learning method and hopefully a great tribute to the original creator.
Why did I steal?
I was born in Germany, but my parents immigrated from Poland. In Germany there’s a stereotype that Eastern Europeans, and especially people from Poland, tend to steal a lot. But confirming this stereotype was not my main motivation … I was inspired by the book Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. This book is full of great advice. It shows how stealing can help you become a better artist — here’s one of my favourite quotes from the book:
If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.
So I thought, if that works for art, then it can work for data visualisation as well. I checked my list of favourite data visualisations and decided to steal one. This article is about how I stole a viz from ‘The Unlikely Odds Of Making It Big’ by The Pudding.
