All the F1 data you never knew you needed, from racing strategy and pit stop times to F1 team finances and Grand Prix logistics — Let’s kick this off with a personal statement: I am neither a sports person nor a car person. In other words, I am the last person who should write a post about F1. But watching Drive to Survive on Netflix has given me a huge appreciation for how F1 teams…

A Visual a Week, Issue 2: How to name a ship, according to whaling voyages and k-means clustering — This is a weekly-ish series where I pick one of the datasets featured in the week’s Data is Plural newsletter and visualize part of it. Read the first issue here. 🔢 The dataset This week’s chosen dataset, from the Jan 26 edition of Data is Plural: Whaling. WhalingHistory.org, a collaboration between the Mystic…

Supplemented by thoughts from Mark Manson, Alain de Botton, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Donald Hall, and even Elon Musk (The TL;DR? It starts with being happy with yourself) — This post is an excerpt of this larger one. A great story is always simultaneously a metaphor for some grand and all-consuming idea in life, like how to be happy or how to find love or if power will make you happy. The best stories, when you finish them, will…

How we sometimes end up creating more problems than we solve , and then go back — full circle — to the way we originally did things — This post is an excerpt of this larger one. This is a Reddit post from a few years ago: I call this the “full circle” phenomenon, where: We improve a product or technology in a way that we think increases our quality of life or capabilities (and it usually…

Double-duty examples of Marimekkos that are both beautiful and interesting, plus tips on when to use them — What’s a Marimekko chart? 🤔 The easiest way to understand any graph type or visual is to look at it, so let’s take the blank example above. A few things you might notice right off the bat: It looks like a bar chart (or a column chart). It looks like a stacked bar chart, a…

The positive-/negative-ness of some political emails, a sampling of emotionally boring email subjects, and which Democratic candidate’s email list to subscribe to if you need an ego boost — This is a weekly series where I pick one of the datasets featured in the week’s Data is Plural newsletter and visualize some aspect of it. The dataset This week’s chosen dataset, from the Jan 19 edition of Data is Plural:

Curated alternatives to browsing /r/dataisbeautiful for three hours in order to find inspiration — When in need of data viz inspiration, it’s true that you can always navigate to Information is Beautiful — or watch David McCandless’s TED talk — or just watch a bunch of data TED talks drop by your favorite information designer’s Instagram or portfolio site (Giorgia Lupi, anyone? …

Based on investor presentations (mostly from 2021) from Hubspot, Snowflake, Zendesk, and two other public companies — Every company — and its investors — cares about growth. And revenue. And a slew of other metrics like CAGR, retention, cash flow, and customer demographics. But each one will focus on different cuts or views of that general metric that are most relevant to their business — or in…

Based on investor presentations (mostly from 2021) from Hubspot, Snowflake, Zendesk, and two other public companies — Note: This is a subset of a post on what metrics public tech companies look at overall. Hubspot (NYSE: HUBS) Retention: customer dollar retention & net revenue retention Retention is always interesting to me because there are so many ways to show it. …