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Welcome to the latest issue of the 'Visualising Data Newsletter', chronicling the most insightful and delightful data viz content every month, straight to your inbox.

Each month I collect, curate, then publish a selection of links to 50 of the best, most interesting, most thought-provoking data visualisation-related content I've encountered during the previous month.

Due to a busy work schedule and lots of non-work distractions, the previous issue had to be a combined collection of the best content I saw published across both May AND June 2025. Similarly, in this month's release, I'm dealing with the stuff I came across during July AND August 2025. From next month's issue onwards the normal monthly rhythm will return!

I hope you continue to find this newsletter useful whether you are working on a dataviz, working in dataviz, or working towards working in dataviz. To catch up on all previous monthly issues visit my Newsletter page.

Thanks, as always, to all of you who subscribe and read these collections. If you like their content your sharing with others or referring people to subscribe is always hugely appreciated.

Andy

Latest from me...

Firstly, some recent posts or announcements relating to my professional services and activities.

Visuals

The freshest data visualisation (or related) design pieces and collections.

7. China Will Make Almost a Third of the World's Cars by 2030 | Bloomberg​

If you can view this as a visitor, past the paywall, there's some lovely comet and connected-dot-plot-style viz.

8. Visualizing Lubartworld​

"This is the history of the Jews from a small Polish town from the 1930s to the 1950s, caught between migration and persecution". Suitably sobering but a wonderfully fulfilled design by the team at WeDoData, funded by the European Research Council.

9. Here's a little thread of some of my favourite viz over the years. | Micah McCurdy on Bluesky​

A few examples of some of the most unique styles I've ever seen (and I mean that complimentarily!) for visualising sporting competition/tournaments/brackets: imagine Sankey diagrams on acid.

10. Distributions | Joey Cherdarchuk on Bluesky​

While we're on about Bluesky threads, here's another beaut from Joey this time profiling loads of different ways of showing distributions.

11. United States of Rising Hazards | Cartoguophy​

"Using FEMA’s National Risk Index dataset, this interactive map aggregates the county-level scores of 18 natural hazards, to 1K-SQ-MI hexagon units, and builds an innovative multivariate visualization... One of the key design objectives of this map is to explore how, when faced with a large number of attributes, a map can simultaneously present both the overall spatial pattern and the ability to retrieve individual attribute details."

12. Bears Will be Boys | The Pudding​

A fascinating data analysis of animal gender in children’s books, topped off with some outstanding title work.

13. The Football Game: how financial rules changed the Premier League | Financial Times​

"Football’s financial rules have never been so front of mind for executives and fans alike. Since 2023, four clubs have been charged with breaking the Premier League’s spending rules, while team owners increasingly complain that the 'bean counters' have taken over the world’s most popular sport." - This is your chance to play bean counter "to see how hard it is to navigate the competing demands from fans, coaches, players and financial regulators." (I failed. Miserably)

14. ₩45.6B or Death | PowerBI​

Despite the proliferation of the tool, it remains surprisingly rare to find a PowerBI visualisation in the wild so it was refreshing to come across this visualisation of the Squid Games players path through each round. Unfortunately I don't have the details of who authored it.

15. A New House for Little Mouse | Annabelle Rincon on Tableau​

Charming piece by Annabelle which showcases a different way of exploiting Tableau's design and interactive capability, and includes some cat dot-density charting.

16. Passport Index Visualization 2025 | Yanouski​

Nice interactive viz from Ihar, showing the countries available to visit without a prior visa to holders of various passports.

17. Stranded at sea | Reuters​

"Italy hailed a drop in irregular arrivals last year as proof its migration policies are working. One boat’s journey shows the dangers of the crackdown."

18. Who Writes the Happiest Number One Funk and Soul Songs? | Nicola Rennie on Bluesky​

"For this week's #TidyTuesday data about Billboard Hot 100 Number Ones, I decided to make a sheet music-themed chart". I love this chart as much as Nicola's attitude: "Is it easy to interpret? No. Is the font easy to read? Also no. But was it fun to make? Yes!"

19. How AI is impacting 700 professions — and might impact yours | Washington Post​

This visualisation allows you to check your job to see if AI is more likely to help you doing your job or more likely to replace you doing your job.

20. The life of plastic | The Guardian​

Nice scrollytelling transitions and lovely illustrations in this story of how plastic contaminates entire ecosystems and the food we eat.

21. How Your Phone Gets The Weather | New York Times​

"Cuts to National Weather Service staff and to funds needed for weather data collection have raised concerns that forecasts may become less reliable"

22. The Surprising Science behind Your Favorite (and Least Favorite) Scents | Miriam Quick on LinkedIn​

"Why do we love some smells and loathe others? This Graphic Science piece looks into the answer. It's based on data from a study of over 1,200 people

23. Surviving the unsurvivable | Reuters​

Another submission from Reuters because they've been pumping out some amazing work (as always). In the aftermath of the catastrophic 'Air India Dreamliner' crash in June, when there was only a single survivor, this piece looks at data which "reveals civil aviation’s most astonishing, exceptional survivals - and shows no seat is reliably safe."

24. Turning 50 years of wildlife data into music | Tiziana Alocci on LinkedIn​

(I need to maybe rethink the categorisation of these links as being 'visual') Here is a sonification of the "Living Planet Index (LPI), which measures the average decline in 34,836 monitored wildlife populations across 5,495 species from 1970 to 2020. Nature is becoming quiet. Literally the sound of silence."

25. Hear New Orleans' rising temperatures in music | NPR​

Once again not a visual, but rather a sonification of data depicting "New Orleans' rising temperatures conveyed via the tempo of a brass band's music"

26. Expanded Voices | BSC Data Viz Group on Bluesky​

If you haven't already had your brain pushed to the limit, let this one deal with that! "Expanded Voices explores the world of AI voice generation, blurring the lines between self, body, and technology. The project uses a voice transfer model, a digital reflection of a physical trait, allowing identity to be shaped, replicated, and disembodied, revealing how artificial intelligence introduces new ways of understanding and expressing the self."

Learning

Relevant articles, interviews, or videos to help further your development in data viz.

30. How clear and simple data visualizations bring the climate crisis home | The Bulletin​

"(The challenge of) how to make climate visuals more meaningful to the public was the motivation behind the recent study I (Rachit Dubey) published in Nature Human Behavior... We wanted to know whether some kinds of data visuals can help make climate change feel more concrete and better reflect the urgency of the crisis... Our findings call for a re-think about how we communicate climate change."

31. Time-warp walkability mapping in ArcGIS Pro | Adventures in Mapping​

"In my mental model of a walkability map it’s not enough to know how far away something is, but also how long it takes me to get there. My perceptions of the same distances, but with different walk times, are much different. There are realities that slow me down like intersections, buildings, water features, or just the gridded nature of a neighborhood, making the temporal terrain of a place highly varies... But what if we could smooth out that temporal variability? Is there a way to visualize this cartographically?" Yes, there is, and here John offers a tutorial on creating "Time-warp walkability maps" using ArcGIS Pro.

32. Playing safely with fire 🤖📊🔥 | Observable​

Mike Bostock's essay introducing the new Observable Canvases product, which makes data analysis visual by offering "interpretable AI for data analysis in order to see through AI’s lies and harness it safely" (The emojis were included in the original title by the way!)

33. Where AI cannot follow | Shirley Wu​

Yes, there continues to be a flurry of AI pieces being written but they are important to continue writing and reading as we all reckon with where we fit with it and where it fits with us. This is typically good writing from Shirley and includes a particularly good (quoted) line: "Find your sacred space where AI is not allowed to enter."

34. How Data Visualization Became My Career Catalyst | Nightingale​

Paul Tsagaroulis, Director of People Analytics at the University of Virginia, describes how "as an industrial-organizational psychologist, I started my career with a clear plan... (then) Data visualization changed everything. It defined my approach to driving change in organizations. Data visualization transformed my career path."

35. New publications | Till Nagel on LinkedIn​

Till describes and links to two new publications that "explore how urban data visualizations can effectively engage the public".

36. Underspecified Human Decision Experiments Considered Harmful | Northwestern​

Interesting paper from Jessica Hullman et al about decision-making studies and how inconsistent (and therefore problematic) is the notion of defining what a “good decision” is.

37. How NOT to Lie with Charts | FILWD via Substack​

Enrico offers "10 Rules for Truthful Data Visualization"

38. What Makes the Difference in a Stacked Bar Chart? | Policy Viz​

In this guest post, Fabio Murgia investigates different ways of bringing out the differences within stacked bar charts: "despite their simplicity, stacked bar charts are demanding: they ask readers to compare values from both a shared baseline as well as separate, shifting baselines–all while interpreting part-to-whole relationships."

39. Review: Become a Great Data Storyteller by Angelica Lo Duca | Nightingale​

Neil Richards in discussion with Angelica Lo Duca about her latest book: 'Become a Great Data Storyteller', which "takes influence from fiction writing and cinematography, introducing characters, heroes, and sidekicks into data storytelling"

40. "Illustration Invades Everything" | Chartography​

Continuing RJ's summer series of historic writings about information design, this essay from Charles Joseph Minard offers a treatise on his “useful idea”, namely his ingenious flow maps which still inspire today, as RJ remarks: "The essay reveals the design thinking behind his extraordinary intellectual and creative power"

41. How data communication in airports can help anyone be 'a data person' | Viz Responsibly​

"I was on travel last week to celebrate a friend’s milestone birthday. Nerd that I am, I’m always curious about how airports communicate data." Nice piece from Amanda and something that also captures the joy and curse of being a data viz person incapable of switching off noticing this stuff in everyday settings.

42. The AI industry is awash in hype, hyperbole and horrible charts | Washington Post​

"Just checking: 69.1 is a larger number than 30.8, right?" (And yes, I know, humans are also shown to be more than capable of making horrible charts)

News & Sundries

Latest developments, announcements, or announcements affecting the data viz world, as well as additional references to pieces covering broader data, tech, or design matters.

44. Storytelling with Data: Before and After | Amazon​

...And in further new-book news, here's the Storytelling With Data crew (namely Cole, Mike and Alex), who have a new text focused on 'Practical Makeovers for Powerful Data Stories'. As one of the opening line states, everyone loves a makeover! (And incidentally I'll be interviewing Cole and Mike for an upcoming Explore Explain episode).

45. Types of Deadlines | Temporal Imagination​

Thanks to Dominikus who shared this diagram based on a set of bespoke illustrations that act as "prompts for people to explore how deadlines operate in different situations and to see challenges we are facing differently" used in the "Timelines, deadlines and lifelines" workshops run by Harriet Hand and Keri Facer.

46. The Who Cares Era | Dan Sinker​

"It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore."

47. 21 Ways People Are Using A.I. at Work | The Upshot​

"Recent surveys have found that almost one in five U.S. workers say they use it at least semi-regularly for work. Twenty-one people told us how..."

48. Weird Buildings: A Global Survey Of Unconventional Architecture | Design Boom​

Another book and this time a classic sort of coffee-table text, 'Weird Buildings' by Imogen Fortes explores some of the most "unusual and imaginative architectural creations around the world".

49. How Two Neuroscientists View Optical Illusions | New York Times​

"The Best Illusion of the Year contest offers researchers, and participants, an opportunity to explore the gaps and limits of human perception."

50. Sketchy Boats​

Not sketchy as in drawn but sketchy as in suspicious, dodgy, maybe untrustworthy... "This site exists because some ships are just... weird. If you've ever looked at a vessel and thought, 'That seems kinda sus,' you're in the right place. Sketchy Boats is a living database of ships, each scored using a custom 'sketchiness' scale. It’s not about hard accusations — we’re not claiming these vessels are doing anything illegal. But we are saying they might be worth a second look."

Thanks for reading!

Hi, I’m ANDY KIRK, an independent data visualisation expert. My vision is to deliver data viz excellence, everywhere. I offer data visualisation professional services to clients worldwide in my capacity as a design consultant, a prolific and experienced trainer, as a four-times published author, as a researcher and sought-after speaker. I'm editor of visualisingdata.com and host of the Explore Explain video and podcast series. If you have a desire to elevate your data viz capabilities, whether at the start of your journey or further along, get in touch.

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