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geeksperhour · 7 years ago

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via Screaming Frog

A few months ago I posted an article that outlined some of the tools & techniques we use at Screaming Frog for coming up with content ideas. Within that post I touched upon several websites that are worth visiting when you’re in need of inspiration, and I wanted to expand on that aspect of ideation by hearing from several experts in the content marketing field.

If you work in content, it’s a good idea to build up a bank of sites, newsletters and Twitter accounts that you find insightful and check them on a daily basis. Not only does it help inspire you, it highlights topics and forms of content that are currently working well, which you can then use to inform your strategy.

A full list of all the sources mentioned below can be found at the bottom of the post.

Hannah Smith

Head of Outreach – Verve Search | @hannah_bo_banna

I recommend BrainPickings.org to just about everyone I meet. It’s run by Maria Popova, who writes extensively about the creative process. It’s an absolute delight, plus as she’s been writing since 2006 there’s an extensive archive to explore, plus she sends out a weekly newsletter.

Austin Kleon is a writer who draws. He authored Steal Like an Artist, the book which finally helped me figure out my own creative process. He also sends out a weekly newsletter which I’d recommend subscribing to.

Matt Muir is an excellent human who shares a bunch of interesting stuff on twitter, plus he curates the wonderful Imperica newsletter, Web Curios which you should subscribe to – it’ll brighten up your Friday, I promise.

Newsletters aside, there are a few sites I like to browse for inspiration:

This Is Colossal

Fast Company

The Guardian’s Art & Design section

Dangerous Minds

Some of our favourite examples from Hannah’s list are:

Lovely Photo Manipulations Utilizing Stock Photography

The NSA’s newly declassified propaganda posters are wild

Nigerian women’s elaborate hairstyles – in pictures

Red Devils, Black Bats & Angry Cats: The Wacky Art of Vintage Fireworks Packaging

Danny Ashton

Founder and CEO – NeoMam Studios | @dannyashton

/r/dataisbeautiful

FlowingData

FiveThirtyEight

I have also been checking out Data USA to what data might be around the topic we are looking at.

Right now I am really loving using both Ahrefs and Buzzsumo to pull out relevant high performing content to get the creative juices flowing.

The evergreen score on Buzzsumo is great for filtering out time-sensitive news stories.

I also like to do keyword searches on the AskReddit subreddit, it’s great at identifying the top questions for a niche.

Some of our favourite examples from Danny’s list are:

Who kissed whom in The Office (US)

A Day in the Life of Americans

Gun Deaths in America

Mark Johnstone

Creative Content Consultant – MarkJohnstone.co | @epicgraphic

NYTimes Graphics on Twitter plus they do an annual roundup of their best visual storytelling.

Washington Post do the same (Twitter and roundup).

BloomBerg are also doing great stuff these days.

My absolute favourite is VisualisingData’s roundups. I also like to keep an eye on Pudding.cool, and /internetisbeautiful and /dataisbeautiful.

The IIB Awards is probably the best curation at the moment.

Plus I always pay attention to what David McCandless is doing on his own site, Information is Beautiful.

In truth, a lot of things cross my path from following Volodymyr Kupriyanov. VK (as he’s known) was my colleague at Distilled, data analyst/journalist/visualisation expert, and an awesome resource if anyone needs any research or data wizardry on their projects. He’s freelance these days :)

I used to follow ChartPorn & iLoveCharts back in the day, but they seem a little less active these days. Still worth checking out the back catalogue if you haven’t already (might take you a while!).

If anyone wants to learn more about visualising data, they should read Tufte’s book and all of the Fell in Love with Data blog (I’ve read it page to page 3 times!). And follow VisualisingData (again!).

And FlowingData is also a good place for inspiring content.

I also tend to see what other agencies are doing – at awards ceremonies or in conference presentations.

The Webby’s also show lots of very cool content – maybe something to aim for one day! :)

Some of our favourite examples from Mark’s list are:

What Music Do Americans Love the Most? 50 Detailed Fan Maps

What #eclipse2017 looked like across the country

All the Buildings in Manhattan

Seven Things to Know About Climate Change

Stacey MacNaught

Freelance SEO Consultant – StaceyMacNaught.co.uk | @staceycav

I’m a big fan of data driven content, so I like to keep an eye on Gov.uk Statistics for newly released data sets. I also like the Yougov blog as they publish regular data findings there and it’s always interesting to see what stories are then picked up further and to unpick what makes them interesting and newsworthy. You can also learn tonnes from following people who regularly create content you love. The guys at Verve Search spring to mind as immediately obvious ones. Follow them all!

But some of the very best inspiration for me comes from sitting in a room with a couple of other freelancers talking about what we’re seeing in the press and throwing ideas around over a coffee. You can’t beat people to sound off.

Some of our favourite examples from Stacey’s list are:

Car driving test data by test centre

YouGov’s Beer Map of Britain

Ryan Sammy

Creative Strategy – Frac.tl | @ryansammy Finding endless inspiration for high-quality content ideas can be challenging. Most people assume ideation (“idea generation”) is a well that can dry up — especially when you’re stuck brainstorming campaign ideas for a boring vertical. At Fractl, we collectively curate a database of inspiration that our Creative Strategists (“project managers”) use to discover new visualization tactics and generate engaging ideas. If you’re feeling stuck, here’s a quick list of our favorite sites for content inspiration:

Kaggle – a goldmine of free datasets waiting to be turned into campaigns! I use Kaggle to get an idea of how people are taking and manipulating existing datasets. Oftentimes, Kaggle helps inspire an correlating idea, or it gives you a new way to examine a dataset you didn’t even consider.I also pay attention to the forks in projects and the competitions.

Data.world – a social media community that is a cross of Github and Kaggle, where users and organizations share their data and projects. Here, you can search keywords related to your client, or follow a specific topics like technology. I personally set up alerts on new projects and popular shares for the vertical(s) we work with the most frequently.

Tableau Gallery – get inspiration from a community of data analysts and content creators! Discover new ways to visualize data based on what catches your eye, and check out what projects people are already creating in your vertical.

Flowing Data – a site dedicated to curating the cutting edge of data visualization. Pro tip: Bookmark tags from specific publishers you’re hoping to land press from (ex. New York Times) to explore the types of data stories and visualizations that these writers are interested in covering.

Curated Content Emails – There are dozens of email lists you can subscribe to for content inspiration. Two of my favorites are Data Is Plural (archives) and Numlock news (archives), both of which curate popular stories that focus on data analysis. These email blasts are a great way to see how a wide variety of publishers are covering data stories.

Github – Saved Github searches like “visualizations” or “scrapers” are an easy way to get inspired by scrapes other data analysts are doing, and they can expose you to new data scraping techniques others are using. The most important aspect of successful content creation is your ability to distill complex data into a format that will quickly resonate with a broad range of readers. These tools will get you started on your mission to create shareable content for your business!

Some of our favourite examples from Ryan’s list are:

Street network orientation in major cities

All the results from FIFA World Cups

Bangalore’s Bus Routes

Shannon McGuirk

Head of PR & Content – Aira | @shannonmcguirk_

Here’s a few sites that the team and I regularly visit:

TeleGraphs (this is great for trending data)

Creative Bloq

Futurism

Infographicsly

Daily Infographic

Entrepreneur Infographics

BBC Infographics

PR Examples (this is great for seeing how PR agencies are leveraging online assets)

Matador Network Infographics

The Guardian Datablog

A few Reddit threads:

/r/datasets

/r/mapporn

/r/infographics

And Twitter profiles:

Telegraph_Data

Ashley_J_Kirk

Ollie

DataDhrumil

Some of our favourite examples from Shannon’s list are:

How Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City broke the Premier League record

Habitable Planets – Could we make them?

Most popular girl name by state from 1960-2012

Three rebrands stores for the thing in Russia

Rebecca Brown

Head of Content – Builtvisible | @rebeccagraceb

Our team find inspiration in a number of places, and like to take in information in a number of ways.

One of our senior consultants told me she listens to the Stuff You Should Know podcast from howstuffworks.com. That podcast is really interesting because it just covers so much, and you get loads of niche information you wouldn’t find anywhere else!

Our design team obviously look for more visual sources of inspiration, and regularly look at look at Muzli, Dribbble and Behance for design. When it comes to web design, one of our visual designers recommends Awwwards.

We also all share news stories and interesting campaigns constantly, which helps give us loads of relevant inspiration for reactive ideas. In every niche we work on we share weekly news updates, but aside from that we have a huge culture of sharing which really helps inspire everyone. We use a tool called raindrop to collate visual inspiration for all teams.

Some of our favourite examples from Rebecca’s list are:

Narwhals: Unicorns of the Sea

99 design inspiration accounts to follow on Instagram

The History of Connection

Emojis: A New Language?

Sources of Inspiration Mentioned

Subreddits

DataIsBeautiful

AskReddit

InternetIsBeautiful

Datasets

MapPorn

Infographics

Data Driven

Flowing Data

FiveThirtyEight

Telegraph Data

The Guardian Data

Visualising Data

Pudding.cool

Information Is Beautiful

Fell in Love with Data

Tableau Gallery

Datasets

Data USA

Data.world

YouGov

News

The Guardian Art & Design

Bloomberg Graphics

Entrepreneur Infographics

BBC.com Infographics

Awards & Galleries

Information is Beautiful Awards

Webby Awards

Awwwards

Visual.ly

Infographicsly

Dribbble

Behance

Twitter Accounts

Matt_Muir – Chief Writer at Imperica

NYTGraphics – The New York Times Graphics Department

V_kupriyanov – Freelance researcher and data analyst

Telegraph_Data – The home of TeleGraphs – a hub of data journalism from The Telegraph

Ashley_J_Kirk – Senior data journalist at The Telegraph

Ollie – Senior writer fivethirtyeight

DataDhrumil – Database Journalist

Blogs

Creative Bloq

The Inspiration Grid

Shutterstock Blog

Canva Blog

Best Infographics

Bored Panda

Futurism

Daily Infographics

PR Examples

Matador Network

Muz.li

Dangerous Minds

Fast Company

This Is Colossal

Chart Porn

I Love Charts

Podcasts

StuffYouShouldKnow

Newsletters

Brainpickings

Austin Kleon

Data is Plural

Numlock

Web Curios

Tools

Ahrefs

Buzzsumo

Books

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Misc

Github Search – visualization

Github Search – scrapers

#IFTTT #Screaming Frog

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chaj · 8 years ago

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via www.visualisingdata.com

After a long time sat patiently on my would-like-to-do list I am delighted to release a new project titled ‘The Chartmaker Directory‘.

WHAT IS THE CHARTMAKER DIRECTORY?

Over the past 5+ years, during which time I have delivered more than 200 data visualisation training events to over 4500 delegates, the question I unquestionably get asked the most is ‘which tool do you need to make that chart?’.

It is a question I often find hard to answer elegantly as it is often weighed down with the classic baggage of “it depends”. Above that, there is such variety in the ways of expressing data visually and arguably an even broader variety of tools offering the means to do so, ranging from simple solutions to the more complicated. It is a large, complex and ever-changing landscape to have to make sense of.

With my training and, by extension, my book primarily emphasising the importance of critical thinking and the underlying craft of data visualisation – the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ – I have been seeking to substantiate this content with solid guidance about the critical matter of ‘how’.

This is what motivated the development of the The Chartmaker Directory: an attempt to gather and organise a useful catalogue of references that will offer people a good sense of what charts can be made using which tools and, where necessary, how.

WHY A ‘BETA’ LAUNCH?

The are two reasons for a beta launch.

Firstly, any digital project needs to be tested to ensure it is functionally robust in a live, concurrent user environment. Hopefully it performs ok in this launch period but if there are any bumps in the road, please let us know.

Secondly, this resource offers a repository to house references to the wonderful array of work and helpful content people are publishing every day to help showcase the spectrum of data visualisation tools and their capabilities. I have done some groundwork to establish the foundation of content with an initial collection of 200+ references but this is only a starting point.

The content compiled on this site will be greatly enriched by being partly crowd-sourced and so I am relying on the goodwill and knowledge of people out there to assist in expanding the references further. I can spend an inordinate amount of time searching for contents on Google but I want to be more incisive in the gathering of the best references from you and be less shaped by what I happen to find.

Therefore, through this beta launch, I want to whet the appetite to encourage contributors. Where you see gaps and think “but I’m sure you can make that chart with that tool?” you will be right, so submit a suggested reference and help grow this directory. There is a long way to go before this represents a truly comprehensive collection.

The best experience for this resource is through the desktop view. This is simply because there is more visible space to offer users to navigate around and interact with the contents. The mobile version offers a slimmed down format that provides a simpler interrogation method suitable to the platform, which enables quick retrieval lists of references based on your desired criteria (ie. driven by the tool and/or chart of interest).

THE DIRECTORY’S CONTENT

The way you explore the directory will depend on your specific motive for browsing the content. You might have different entry points expressed through the following questions:

If I want to make a certain chart with which tools can I make that?

If I want to invest in a given tool which charts will it enable me to make?

If I want to make a specific chart in a given tool, but don’t know how to create it, can I find a solution to help me?

If I am a vendor looking to enhance my tool’s capabilities, which chart types am I missing and which appear to be under-served by competitor offerings?

To answer these curiosities, the directory’s content is presented through a simple matrix. Across the top are a selection of chart-making tools and a comprehensive list of different chart types are presented down the side. Within the intersecting cells, you will find unfilled and filled circular markers representing a reference in the directory.

An un-filled circle represents a link to an example, providing visual evidence that a given chart can be made in a given tool – read it as “here’s a link to a bar chart made using Excel”, for example. A filled circle represents a link to a tutorial, providing both an example and guidance for how to make a given chart in a given tool. Tutorials might exist as how-to step-by-step instructions, how-to video demonstrations, downloadable workbooks/templates or might provide reusable code. Think of examples as an illustration that a chart can be made in a tool, tutorials as the provision of a solution to make a chart in a tool.

A few of points about these references. Firstly, not all chart-tool combinations require tutorials, simply knowing a chart is possible to make in a given tool can be sufficient in many cases. Whilst most people using Excel will know how to create a bar chart easily enough – as a standard, off-the-shelf chart type – fewer may know how to create a connected dot plot as it is not a default chart option and involves more of a workaround solution. Secondly, the aim is to ensure the references included are publicly accessible tutorials/examples that don’t require memberships, paywall access, or the need to signup for white-papers.

Where you see gaps, initially, these will largely be indicative of unsourced references. As the content grows over time, the significance of these empty cells will shift to revealing the extent of a tool’s breadth of capabilities. However, it is important to state that widespread gaps for a given tool does not mean it is necessarily inferior to another tool that has many references. Few tools can realistically seek to offer everything and, indeed, many accomplished tools provide useful specialisation, such as mapping tools like Mapbox, which is only really ever going to provide capabilities for spatial analysis.

THE TOOLS

A particular tool’s inclusion is intentionally flexible and open for debate. I know what tools exist but I don’t know them all functionally, nor can I as there are simply too many. Indeed, I’ve never even had the chance to play with more than a fraction of the tools that are available so I can’t say with confidence what they are all potentially capable of. Additionally, there are some tool vendors with impenetrable sites that fail to showcase their explicit offering.

There are quite a few tensions for the criteria of inclusion:

The tool responsible for a solution can sometimes be somewhat blurred as a visualisation task often involves several. Though most of the examples and tutorials curated will relate only with the associated tool column, some references may involve solutions that include the use of other tools. For example, one might use RAWGraphics to generate a data-driven chart, export it into svg format then place it in Adobe Illustrator to refine the appearance. My intention for examples like this is to position the example or tutorial reference be against RAWGraphics. Even though it was not produced solely within that environment it would have been the primary chart creating device.

Some tools only really become capable chart-making devices when used in partnership with extendable libraries, extension packages or plugins. For example, R alone can make charts but R with the ggplot2 package is a combination that unlocks the potential for a much greater, more sophisticated visualisation capability to be achieved. Whether R should be presented alone or with ggplot2 – and how other similar related packages should be presented – is part of the dialogue I wish to encourage.

A further issue is how to include capabilities of tools that build upon, facilitate or provide a different front-end experience to other tool, for example in the way Rstudio, Shiny, and INZight might in relation R. Should they be included as separate options or is it reasonable to house them under the general broad-church heading of ‘R’? Some tools are quite hard to pin down in terms of what they do themselves versus what they facilitate such as Plot.ly. Defining its role and its place is hard given the fluidity of what it is offering as a means to utilise JS, R and Python capabilities.

The suite of tools that exist under the banner of a single vendor is also quite messy to define. In the directory, Tableau is presented as a single tool but should be considered to cover the capabilities of Tableau Desktop and Tableau Public. Likewise QlikView references cover QlikView and QlikSense. In some cases, the range of products under a single vendor family are quite distinct in their offering. Again, I welcome clarifications and suggestions for refinements.

Some applications, like Adobe Illustrator, that unquestionably play a role in many peoples’ workflow (especially for static work), are not intended to be included because they aren’t necessarily responsible for the creation of a data-driven charts. You can make charts in Ai but it is a fairly primitive capability. Otherwise, you can use it as a means of manually drawing a chart piece-by-piece using the illustration tools. However, this directory is intended to represent a collection of references for the making of the charts not necessarily the creation of the final polished piece of work. It is also not about interactive features offered by tools to interrogate and enrich charts.

There are many people out there who are well-placed to help shape the inclusion of tools in this directory and I would encourage suggestions for additions/refinements. This is a further reason for the beta status of this launch though I’m sure it will be an ongoing conversation.

A quick note about the ordering of the tools. Initially, this has been set to alphabetical to facilitate quicker lookup but future iterations may see the sorting changed to emphasise the tools with the most through to the least references across the directory or grouping them to distinguish desktop vs. browser, programming vs. application, free/OpenSource vs. proprietary.

THE CHARTS

In contrast to the tools, the criteria for a chart type’s inclusion is far more fixed. The presented list has been shaped by my work creating a taxonomy of chart types for my recent book. They are representative, in my view, of most of the charts most people may ever need to use in their work. There are so many further subtle variations and derivatives – tweaking the deployment of marks and attributes – that an exhaustive collection is virtually impossible but this should represent a sufficiently comprehensive list for most peoples’ needs.

The charts are organised in to five families based on the focus of the analysis they primarily facilitate. These families form the acronym ‘CHRTS’, which stands for categorical, hierarchical, relational, temporal and spatial. The colour key at the top indicates the shaded associations. These families are not entirely exclusive as many charts will inevitably be able to facilitate multiple windows into your data but this organisation is hopefully a reasonably sensible grouping approach. A search box is provided at the top for you to search and filter the chart type list using entered keywords.

The chart names are, again, never going to be universally agreed upon. Different tools name the same chart type techniques differently to other tools, even when they are ubiquitous like the bar chart, which is often labelled a column chart. The chart names proposed merely represent a personal lexicon. Supplementing these names, however, are the ‘AKAs’ (also known as) which are included in the tooltip display when you hover over each chart. Furthermore, some of the references included will relate directly to the AKA chart names.

What this resource is not aiming to do is to guide you when to use a chart and when not to. As I’ve said above, my other offerings cover this focus so this resource is a supplementary aid. There will be some people outraged by the inclusion of the word cloud or the radar chart, most likely with good reason, but this is not the place to explore the nuances of when they are and aren’t appropriate chart types to use. If you have reasonable justification to use a chart type, this resource helps to guide you how and with what you can make it. I do, though, provide a short description in the tool-tips of each chart type to offer some context for their respective roles.

CONTRIBUTING TO THE CHARTMAKER DIRECTORY

In addition to exploring the content, the second way of using this directory is through contributing content. As I have stated, I am going to be constantly seeking out and incorporating examples and tutorials myself but one of the fundamental purposes of this site is to create an opportunity to crowdsource valuable references.

On the top left you will find the + button which offers a simple three-step process to allow contributors to suggest a link to either an example or tutorial of a chart being made by a specified tool. Multiple references are welcome for the same chart-tool combination but, inevitably, plugging the gaps as much as possible is a key goal, initially at least.

Submitted suggestions will be received on email and considered for inclusion, please don’t expect them to automatically appear in the directory. When it comes to sending suggestions for contributing references, the main appeal I would make is please don’t just dump a load of links on an email to me and instead use the submission process provided wherever possible.

If you have additional suggestions for tools to be added, please get in touch with details. Constructive and realistic suggestions for enhancements to the directory will always be well-received but I’m going to be fairly strict on only accepting compelling reasons for adding further chart types. Finally, if you feel a significant AKA has been missed please do let me know.

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