Visualize your data in style!

I discovered the profession of Information Designer through the inspiring work of Federica Fragapane, which consists of making the data visible, in particular the encrypted data.

Surely you have happened to have tables of numbers for several variables, and you have set out to present them in a graphic form rather than communicating them in their raw form. Perhaps you have said to yourself that the easiest way is to make a graph by variable. For example, countries according to GDP, then countries according to their number of inhabitants, then countries according to their population density, etc. But by separating each variable in this way, you ask your reader to cross-reference the information himself. So, why not produce a visual that brings together several layers of information? This complex, enriching and essential work is called data visualization. And I am going to present you here a method and tools allowing you to push your skills and your curiosity of designs further!

Personally, I learned a lot by learning about this discipline, and I intend to use these new dimensions of knowledge in the development of my genetic data visuals as part of my thesis and the communication of my research work. . Applying newly acquired knowledge to an area that interests you personally or professionally is a good exercise that allows you to deeply integrate these new skills.

Below are simply presented the different stages, from data collection to the production of your visual, and for each stage tools or sources of inspiration that may be useful to you.

1) Collecting information

If you are at the beginning of your project, you must necessarily go through a data collection stage, either by going to seek them from different reliable sources (if you are carrying out bibliography work) or by producing your own data yourself. (through experimental work).

Here are some reliable sources of information: scientific articles published in journals after peer review. You can find this kind of article by keyword research on PubMed, Google Scholar, Our World in Data or World Bank for example, or the Researchermobile application. Among the most famous scientific journals we find Science, Nature, Elsevier, ... Some are more specialized than others (Cell biology, Medical biology, Physics, etc ...), each field having its major scientific journals. Regarding Our World in Data and World Bank, you can directly download their data tables on the topics that interest you.