“Where There’s Smoke, there must be fire.”

and other inspiring data visualization insights from

“The Adventures of Harold and the Purple Crayon”

Written by Crockett Johnson

Design, statistics, analysis, narratives, and mediums (tools) are all essential parts of creating good data visualizations. It’s important to become familiar with each part of the whole, but where do you begin? It can seem overwhelming.

Let me tell you my story:

Here’s a look at just a part of my book collection* since I started digging into data visualization over a year ago.

It can seem overwhelming.

*Not pictured are all of my Python and other basic learning how to program books on Kindle.

*Also not pictured: All the data visualization Twitter accounts I follow, time spent at community workshops, meetups, in person classes, and online classes.

So today, in commemoration of my first year (plus a few months) into this learning journey, I am taking you with me, back to the simple basics with an old friend, Harold.

You remember Harold from “The Adventures of Harold and the Purple Crayon” by Crockett Johnson.

Remember the first time you learned about data visualization? Boom. Easy concept to understand. A bar graph. A pie chart. Excel. What’s there to know beyond that? You said to yourself, “What’s there to be afraid of? I think I’ll walk down this road and check it out.”

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This is a Simple and Easy to Understand Bar Graph

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Those were the good old days. It was like you were Harold and there was just this one purple crayon … but then you learned what you could do with the purple crayon and just using Excel didn’t seem so great anymore.

You knew you needed to learn more, but where could you turn?

You kept hearing strange new terminology and people telling you about wonderful new worlds they’ve discovered using Python, R, D3. What did it all mean? Suddenly, this little evening walk seemed different.

This new and simple concept suddenly seemed daunting and intimidating … and maybe even a bit frightening.

You had so much to learn.

You decided to pick a tool and stay on a clear path.

So do you choose Tableau or Qlikview or PowerBI or … ?

And then there were these rules you were supposed to just intuitively know and abide by, a/k/a “The Rules/Laws of Data Visualization”, that all of the datavisscholars already knew instinctively:

Pie charts are considered low brow and not used anymore.

Don’t cut a y axis short.

Nobody uses 3D or animation, unless … (complex explanation of the one or two exceptions follow).

But you didn’t know, and you used them in a presentation … and then someone brought it to your attention.

And once you realized what you had done, you felt like others knew and were laughing at your efforts. You felt embarrassed and inadequate and wanted to just … disappear …

… but even though you knew you were over your head, you wanted to keep going.

You decided to hang in there and not disappear. You found nice people to help you along the way …

… and you stuck with it and continued on your adventure.

And along the way you learned things like “correlation doesn’t always imply causation”.

So that somebody who said, “Where there’s smoke there must be fire” wasn’t necessarily correct.

You learned it was important to study the data, respect the data, and to not draw conclusions until you’re absolutely sure.

You also discovered “Big Data”. Too-big-for-Excel-Big-Kind-a-Data. Then you learned there was something called Python that would help with that. This world was getting bigger by the moment and more and more interesting.

You started creating again and you were so excited to share your creations with others … your co-workers, your boss, your peers, your family, your pets! Everyone will love it!

It was all getting so exciting … but still seemed overwhelming. The new vocabulary. Those words you were still afraid to speak: Was it pronounced choropleth or chloropeth?

The new cool new tools that you were learning how to use: Tableau, Qlikview, PowerBI, Python, R, Adobe Illustrator, Advanced Excel formulas and beyond. The universe was getting bigger and bigger.

And like Harold, you started wondering about all the things in the world … all the data sources you could explore and what conclusions you could draw from studying them.

But once you explored the data, you still had questions and no real answers. You felt like you were in the middle of a desert again.

But like Harold, you didn’t give up, you persevered and found the answers you needed.

Finding answers felt like discovering a pool of water near a palm tree in the desert after a long walk.

And we discovered like Harold did, that something we first see as a moon, may instead be a flying saucer.

But then we realize how much we don’t know, and like Harold, we run away for a while. Sometimes feeling stuck, but most of the time spending time learning more about our newfound passion.

And we get so lost in the data, we start to wonder what planet we are on.

Sometimes it feels like Mars. And then we might feel lonely and have a great need for company, because we’ve come all this way and hope to chat about our new discoveries.

So we join classes, meetup groups, workshops. And there we find the friendly faces. Our peers. Our mentors.

And like Harold, we creep back and try again. Sometimes running as fast as we can and failing.

It seems like falling in the dark.

And then things become clear and bright again and we aren’t so bothered by all of the big mountains and intimidating flying saucers.

Because those flying saucers that seemed so scary, sometimes just turn out to be oatmeal bowls.

We breathe a sigh of relief knowing that we have proven to ourselves that we can do it. One step at a time. And so we keep at it … until we get hungry … or tired, and then it’s time to take a break and start all over again the next day.