Welcome to the latest issue of the 'Visualising Data Newsletter', chronicling 50 of the most insightful and delightful data viz pieces of content I have encountered since the last issue right up to the end of last month.

After a brief interruption of the regular newsletter due to a busy work schedule, in this month's issue I'm bundling my discoveries from over May AND June 2026 into one collection. Even though summer months can be a little quieter than normal, there's still tons of great stuff being published.

Happy Viz'ing!

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. Sagrada Familia: 100 years after Gaudí | Pedro Jiménez on LinkedIn​

Within this post there are links to three chapters of a wonderful visual series for Radiotelevisión Española covering the history of Gaudí's architectural gem the 'Sagrada Familia', in Barcelona.

8. America is mighty—but becoming less dominant | The Economist​

"Ahead of its 250th birthday, an empirical look shows the world’s leading country no longer stands so far apart" with some excellent vertical alluvial diagram action.

9. Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise | The Pudding​

Some stunning 'Pudding' work going on right now, this latest piece from Russel Samora and Shelly Tan, offers a visual exploration of 200,000 similes from popular fiction.

10. Dive Into a Very Noisy Sea With Some Very Rare Whales | New York Times​

Stunning piece from Katherine Chui and Catrin Einhorn looking at how sonic blasts from oil exploration activity are creating stressful loud environments for whales, jeopardising their existence.

11. In charts: How Brexit still divides British voters | Financial Times​

If you're going to go Sankey, you might as well go all-in, Big Sankey - and that's what the FT did here with a perfectly-judged chaotic portrayal of the division and chaos of British politics.

12. Indian Railways: The Full History | Sheets.Works​

"Every railway line India has built since 1853, mapped from the original opening records."

13. The $19 Billion World Cup | Key Data Studio​

"Behind the first World Cup with 48 teams and 1,248 players is a striking reality: 81% of the tournament's total market value — nearly 519 billion - is concentrated in just five leagues, all of them European."

14. The World Cup’s heat hazard | Financial Times​

"Many of the host cities for the [World Cup] matches — including Miami, Dallas, Houston and Atlanta — are regularly experiencing WBGT - 'Wet-Bulb Globe Temperatures' - above the threshold that medical experts say can harm human health."

15. Some World Cup Teams Will Face a Much Hotter Tournament | Bloomberg​

Similar analysis of a key issue that was facing teams ahead of the tournament showing how "almost a quarter of matches will take place in potentially punishing conditions, creating an uneven playing field before a ball is kicked."

16. Historic Handshake | SCMP​

You can't NOT include a World Cup bracket graphic and this is a lovely visual guide to the tournament by Victor Sanjinez

17. Nothing new here: Another sequel, another lighthouse | Not-Ship​

"I'm tired of the sameness; it's everywhere". Amanda expertly unpicks her fatigue - and that of many more of us, I'm sure - at how many movies released these days are "gravitating toward a generic uniformity" based on franchises or existing IP.

18. The fragile economies at the heart of rural hospitals | Reuters​

A visual-buffet masterpiece from Sarah Slobin looking at what makes small town healthcare different in the US. Just when you think you've seen the final novel representation method, a new one pops up.

19. NBC News Graphics | NBC​

A new home for the collection of news explainers, visualisations, and data analysis from the NBC News Digital Data/Graphics team.

20. Project Cosmos | Carbon Brief​

"Introducing Project Cosmos, the world’s largest database of climate change research" featuring, connecting, and enabling the exploring off 1.8 million studies.

21. Artemis Photo Timeline | Hank Green​

A smart interactive chronology of the mission's operations and record of each video/photo taken.

22. We've calculated your chances of winning money on Polymarket | Washington Post​

(Spoiler: They're not great, unless you're in the minority) Love the heatmap showing the spread of trade gains and losses.

23. The delicate choreography of the Trump-Xi state dinner | Reuters​

"Mapping the seating, and menu behind China’s state banquet during Trump’s visit to Beijing."

24. Colombian Presidential Elections | John Guerra​

A typically-smart interactive viz from John exploring every Colombian presidential race since 1974.

25. The King's Court | ESPN​

23 moment's from Lebron James' 23 seasons. What a brilliant way to frame and sequence the exploration through a career of key milestones and clips.

26. How Trump's Proposed Arch Could Complicate D.C.s Congested Airspace | New York Times​

Exploration of Washington D.C's crowded airspace in the context of Trump's intention to build a 250-foot arch in an area which is one of the US's busiest air spaces and close to a deadly midair collision in 2025.

27. A Giant Map of the World | Visual Cinnamon​

Motivated by a desire to see the world map through a different aesthetic to her old IKEA world map, Nadieh Bremer "started working on [her] own version of a world map, an even bigger one. Adding more details (e.g. the terrain of the oceans), more labels, more data, more color."

28. Weather Replay | Copernicus ECMWF

"Your time machine to revisit past weather" - I always get frustrated when weather maps/forecasts only ever showing the now/near future forecast and not what just happened, so I love this tool to browse through a history of weather data.

29. The Digital Lives of Young Indians | Quest Alliance​

Lovely work by the team at Revisual Labs exploring how young Indians use, understand and experience social media.

30. Deleted Data | The Guardian​

Analysis of Trump’s destruction of the US's data infrastructure that will "have lasting impacts on all aspects of life – whether it’s the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to extreme weather, public health departments’ monitoring of harmful new drugs in their communities or how food banks get meals to hungry families."

31. The Long Journey From the Strait of Hormuz to the Gas Tank | New York Times​

Lovely work by Agnes Chang and Pablo Robles to show the complicated geo-temporal story of how oil travels from the Strait to the consumer and how disruptive the current conflicts effecting the region are proving.

Learning

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

35. Good Frictions | Chartography​

Smart essay from RJ about convenience and inconvenience and how, though "some friction is stupid, cruel, exclusionary, and designed to protect whoever already has power", good friction is different.

36. The Friction Question | Penina S Finger​

...and a lovely coincidence to see a similar enquiry from Penina framed around the question: "As the machines that assist our thinking get smarter and smarter, how much assistance is too much?"

37. Fifteen Maps that Changed How We See the Ocean Floor | The Library of Lost Maps​

Celebrating the Pioneering Cartography of Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen

38. Designing Visualizations for Things That Don’t Exist Yet | Open Visualization Academy​

Excellent article by Michela Tjan looking at themes around showing forecasts and their uncertainty given they've yet to happen. "In reality, futures branch instead of extend, uncertainty compounds over time, and outcomes are often non-linear and asymmetric."

39. Behind the scenes: A Love Story | Charthead​

Alvin Chang's latest piece for The Pudding - A Love Story - follows "more than 1,000 people as they navigate their love lives across a massive societal disruption" and this is his companion BTS posting.

40. Visualisation Toolkit for the Humanities | Brill​

Profiling Juuso Koponen's contributing chapter for the book "An Introduction to Data Visualisation of the Writing Process"

41. The half of journalism AI can’t do yet | AI In The News​

Florent Daudens looks at a new paper from Oxford and Stanford Universities, where they built a seven-agent 'virtual newsroom'. Having tested it, he writes about how the result "says less about whether AI can do journalism, more about which half of the job is still ours."

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.

43. Recruiting Participants | University of Iowa​

PhD student Tianwei Ma is recruiting participants for a study on artistic data visualisation which sounds really interesting - "we're studying how people generate and develop ideas in artistic data visualization and the external methods they use to explore and shape those ideas" - with recruitment running through to end of August.

44. Data Kids’ Award Projects | Data2Kids​

A lovely gallery of the work submitted for the first Data Kids Award which featured 203 registrations from 56 countries - "no required tools, no templates, no prescribed format. Kids could use paper, clay, candy, sand, or any software they chose. The only requirement was that the work had to be grounded in real data."

45. Change of Management | Clever Franke​

Big news from Holland where, in 2027, Founder and Managing Director and all-round Excellent Guy Thomas Clever will step down "passing the baton to a new generation of leadership". All the best to Thomas in whatever this next chapter brings him and good luck to the extremely capable incoming leadership team of Wouter van Dijk and Susanne de Graaf.

46. Mapping Knowledge Across Time | Routledge​

New book by Paul Kahn which asks 'What patterns do we use to represent knowledge of the world?' through the lens of 'seven books that visualized the world'.

47. World Cup challenge: 26 iconic moments | The Straits Times​

"After a four-year wait, the world’s biggest sporting event is back! How many iconic moments can you score in our World Cup challenge? Ready, steady, goal!"

48. The Accidental Brilliance of Makeshift Signs | Youtube​

Encountered via Francis Gagnon, this is indeed a lovely TED talk by Kate Canales who "has spent more than 20 years photographing the handmade, improvised signs that appear when the original falls short."

49. The Boring Internet | Terry Godier​

"The internet you grew up on isn’t dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is."

50. Eyeball | Rory Codes​

This is fun (for those of us of a visualisation persuasion, at least). "Click where you think the number falls on the line. A minimalist game of numerical intuition."

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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