At everviz, we want to help everyone easily visualize and communicate with data.
That’s why we handpicked some of our favorite data visualization resources to educate and inspire you. Learn how to make visualizations, charts, graphs and maps that are engaging and memorable.
Data visualization insights
Choosing the right visualization for your data
There is a wide range of different types of data visualizations, and different charts are good for different purposes. Simple visualizations (such as pie charts, bar charts, and line charts) are widely used and will be easily interpreted by most audiences. However, there are many other options and opportunities to get creative with how you display your data and maximize its impact.
How to find data sources for data visualization and 3 Inspiring data visualization sources
So you want to make a chart? Do you have data? I’m assuming that could be a “No,” since you’re reading this. Well let us tell you how to go about this business then. Before you start, make sure you check your expectations.
Brand consistency – what is it, and why is it important?
Here at everviz, we strongly believe in the power of branding. That’s why we’ve built in full customization capabilities, so that you can align your charts and maps to your own brand identity. This means you can use your own custom colors, fonts and logo to ensure your visualizations reflect your brand identity. Our themes allow you to create templates which make it easy for your whole team to produce impactful charts and graphs that are consistent with your brand guidelines. But what exactly is brand consistency, and why does it matter?
Does data visualization need data storytelling? Or does data storytelling need data visualization?
In this article, our guest blogger Rebeca Pop discusses and answers two questions, both equally important to anyone working with data: Does data visualization need data storytelling? Or does data storytelling need data visualization?
How effective is my data visualization? Well, It depends…
Pick the right color, make thoughtful chart choices, consider color-blindness, avoid clutter – you dive deep into each of these topics, master them, and, done! You are ready to start creating informative and effective data visualizations.
Well… not quite! As straightforward as these choices might sound, the reality is much more complex. In real life, “it depends”, and not “right” or “wrong” should be the more common words.
Explanatory vs. exploratory data visualization
Learn more about the differences and similarities!
Tips & tricks
10 ways to engage your readers with interactive visual content
If you’re trying to distinguish your brand and get readers to easily retain information and take action, one of the best things you can do is make your visual content interactive. The more time people spend reading and engaging with your content, the higher is the chance that your audience will take desired action, return to your page and share your work with others. In this post, we will show you 10 built-in interactivity features to make your visual content more engaging without creating a single line of code.
Reference Lines, Plot Bands, arrows, ranges or goal lines! These are just a few ways you can Highlight your data to help your audience better understand the context and your argument.
You asked for it, and now we are thrilled to say that Highlights are part of the annotation section in everviz. This may be horizontal bands to highlight data ranges by time or vertical bands to highlight data above or below a certain threshold.
10 starting points to visualize election data
In this article we are providing 10 visualizations that your newsroom can use as a starting point to share your electoral insights in a simple way.
How to create financial data visualizations
It can be difficult to communicate financial information to different audiences, but a well-designed graph or chart can help you to get your message across.
How to make research data graphs and charts for the web
If you are a researcher or academic, the growth of the internet has brought many opportunities for sharing your achievements with the world! However, journal publication can still be a lengthy process, and sometimes you might just want to share a quick snippet of your research activities less formally.The good news is that it is easier than you might think to turn your data into stunning graphics to engage an online audience. This article will help to understand what works well on the web, and how to make your research results shine!
Websites we like
This is the biggest time-saving search for datasets. This search will cover the most important datasets coming from World Bank Open Data, WHO Open Data Repository, UN Data, UNICEF Data Warehouse, World Bank, World Economic Forum, European Union Open Data Portal, Centre for Disease Control, and Data.gov amongst others. The topics you can expect to find here range from population data, labour markets, education, trade, and public health. There is a wealth of data here all central to doing good and improving the world. Definitely start here if you want to do something worthwhile.
This is a repository of large datasets relating to biology, chemistry, economics, and physiology, including the Human Genome Project. These are quite focussed on basic sciences rather than the human sciences of the first data source. Similarly, this is a search engine searching through data sets, so you won’t find the actual data set in the results. You will need to identify the data set you want from the search results and then visit the website hosting the data source in order to download the data. There are 219 data sets including web crawl data, satellite imagery, and dictionaries for natural language processing. The download formats are the same as mentioned above and again, you might need to go on quite a journey to get to the data source to download it.
Kaggle is full of amazing data sets. It is a crowd sourced platform offering training and data sets to sharpen your data science skills. These data sets are incredibly varied and cover topics such as business, public health, and a range of more obscure yet somehow interesting topics (e.g. characteristics of the survivors and those who died on the Titanic). A big part of Kaggle are the competitions. These are fun but the prizes are cash so definitely take them seriously. This platform is fantastic about inclusion and support so try to get to know them a little better.
You must have registered with Kaggle to access their data sets. Don’t worry; it’s free. Downloads are usually zipped folders containing comma separated value files which are good for everviz. Nice!
Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/
Reddit is a site for posts and conversations in the comments. In the sub-reddit Datasets, people are posting datasets attached to their post. You can find some incredibly random data sets here. Not 100% fact-checkable as it’s not a reliable body to be supplying data but go for it to have fun. The most common data sets will be on topics that are topical such as latest events and global happenings. There are also a lot of posts looking for very particular data sets and often someone will find something relevant and put this in the comments so definitely check the comments for data sources too.
Google Finance
https://www.google.com/finance & https://trends.google.com
There isn’t too much to say about these sites, because they are simple and we all know Google already. These sites are fantastic for up to date data.
Google Finance brings you market and share trading data which is refreshing at n amazing pace for being an open data source. It is informative just to be on the landing page! The site is straightforward and uncluttered. In order to get to the financial data you need to already have placed the shares you are interested in your account to follow in a “portfolio.” To get your data just log in, head to your portfolios, and download the data from there.
Google Trend is similarly clean and basic. You can look up any text you can dream of and Google Trend will bring you the data on it. This data is already summarised in charts for you to manipulate. As soon as you are happy with the data, there is a nifty little download button that will bring you the comma separated variable document. How fantastic!
A project developed by Severino Ribecca. It is a great reference for information on different chart types and methodology.
Our World in Data is an online publication that shows how living conditions around the world are changing. It shares this information through interactive data visualizations and research data.
