October 27, 2016

Have you heard about “Makeover Monday”?

Every Sunday Andy Cotgreave and Andy Kriebel present a data set and a visualization that has been published somewhere in the world. The data sets range from Peaches to Police Violence and anything and everything in between. The point of it all is to present the data in a new way; keep what works and change what doesn’t. The project has run since January 2016, and to date over 400 Tableau developers/fans/enthusiasts have submitted their takes on the data.

I only recently started participating despite watching it with great envy all year. Why did I start? A couple of reasons.

  1. The challenge – There are rules to the @MakeoverMonday project. The hardest one from me is the time box. Limiting myself to one hour is difficult because I like to explore data, and figure out what’s going to work best. This process can take a while depending on the data set, and considering I have zero familiarity with the data sets each week made it tougher.
  2. The learning – I’m trying to try new techniques and break out of “the easy and obvious” when and where I can with these challenges; it will only make me better
  3. Beauty in Simplicity – With only an hour to use, I can’t spend a lot of time on complexity, color palettes and the like. I have to do what works and disregard what doesn’t; Make it impactful and make it tell the story.

I’m posting my #MakeoverMonday offerings over at SonsOfHierarchies.com if you are interested. I’ve done the last two weeks, and I went back and found a couple of data sets to “catch up” on for practice. By posting them I’m hoping to see the evolution of my efforts, and if I learn anything cool along the way, I’ll be sure and add it on the blog post.

You can follow the #MakoverMonday action on Twitter or at the main website.