A Beginner’s Guide to Data Visualization Design

In this course we will walk through how to develop a story with your visualizations, how to identify the right visualization for your needs and we’ll introduce some of the most current visualization software and programming languages. By the end of this course you’ll be able to:

1. Plan what results to include when presenting data to an audience

2. Craft a compelling story with said data

3. Identify which types of visualizations are best for different kinds of data

4. Determine which software or platform to use to create visualizations

5. Successfully create simple and clean visualizations using any software or language

You’ll also be able to:

1. Wow your coworkers with beautiful visualizations like social networks, heat maps and take your bar charts to the next level

2. Know the inside scoop on various visualization tools like D3.js, Tableau and R

To help solidify what you learn they’ll be various course activities for you to practice the concepts covered ranging from making sure your data is ready to be visualized to deconstructing a graph and removing unnecessary information. At the end of the course there will be an assignment where you will create from scratch a self-contained visualization of your choosing. Oh and don’t forget that the visualization will need to be engaging and understandable. But don’t worry, we’ll walk through every step together so that by the end of the course you’ll be able to wow your managers and colleagues with the most current visualization techniques. Sound fun? Then let’s get started!!