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The Visualising Data Newsletter - Issue #26, August 2026
Published 14 days ago • 10 min read
Welcome to the latest issue of the Visualising Data Newsletter, chronicling 50 of the most insightful and delightful data viz pieces of content I encountered last month. Though summer months can be quieter there was still tons of great stuff being published during July, so here's what made my list.
Happy Viz'ing!
Andy
Latest from me...
Firstly, some recent posts or announcements relating to my professional services and activities.
I have a brand new course scheduled, the 2-day 'Masterclass' training event will be taking place at Flourish HQ in London over Mon 23rd and Tue 24th November. If you want to start the post-summer season with some world class learning, why not join us in London! Visit this link for details about the course, the pricing, and information about how to register. Newsletter subscribers can bag themselves a 10% discount by using the promo code [SUBSCRIBERS ONLY!] at checkout.
Earlier this summer I embarked on an outside-of-work project to bring a bit of colour to a blank garden wall. Other than brightening up a part of the garden that spends most of the day in shade, it was also a nice opportunity for some analogue creativity and to briefly, if not entirely, get away from tech. Here's a brief write up of the process I went through!
Another month, another masterpiece from Nicholas Rougeux. This time I'll let his own words do the talking as they convey the scale of this: "I spent nine months creating a digital edition of The Naturalist’s Library, William Jardine’s 40-volume 19th-century natural history series. 1,300+ plates restored, 2.4m words, 27 posters, and 1 huge book." How did he do it all? Here's the similarly substantial making-of process write-up.
Alexander Bogachev has created these fascinating football match visuals based on the notion of blankets to indicate a sense of a game's 'tilt': 'a generative data-portrait of the tournament, where each match is rebuilt from its real numbers into a single moving image — readable at a glance, honest to the last touch'.
"This map shows how people in the United States identify their ancestry or family origin. Use it to explore the many ways we describe our heritage and ourselves."
6. Added time, added drama: Why more goals are coming later than ever | Reuters
And a second immediate entry for Reuters, with this super work looking at late goals in the World Cup, mixing cutting edge visualisations with wonderful photography.
7. An Opinionated Guide to Ranking Ethical NBA Championships in the 21st Century | The Pudding
Love it. Love the audacity to just go with an opinion based approach to establish who are the baddies and the goodies of NBA. Love the heads rolling round and landing into different analytical buckets. Great work Russell.
8. One Calf Shows Why Record Beef Prices Still Aren't Coming Down | Bloomberg
Shared via Alark Joshi, I agree this is a super example of scrollytelling with brilliant illustrations and timeline design showing how the 18-month beef supply chain means prices will remain high for a while yet.
A new site offering an interactive treemap of insider trading, which seems a super useful resource for investigations about what company insiders are buying and selling.
10. Trump promoted companies on Truth Social days after buying their stocks | CNN
Entirely unrelated to the previous post... Amy O'Kruk reveals how Trump uses his social platform to post favourably about companies he has bought stocks in.
"The classics, mapped - every journey in the book, drawn on a hand-tinted period map, with the real 1890s Ordnance Survey wherever the story walks in Britain."
14. How to See the Most Popular US National Parks, Without the Crowds | Bloomberg
With the increasing popularity of National Parks in the US creating leading to crowds of visitors, this guide offers a way to find the best weeks to visit 16 of them.
"Across the world, the hottest nights are warming at a faster rate than the hottest days - with increasingly severe consequences for health and economic repercussions also set to get worse."
Fascinating analysis with some beautiful dynamic fourishes showing how the words included in the 'essential vocabulary' lists, used to teach people English as a second language, has changed between iterations of the lists in 1953 and 2023.
"48 countries competing. 96 jerseys on display. Vote for your favorite designs and see how they rank with Times readers." (* just realised the voting has now closed so its no longer the interactive it originally was but if you ask me the away strips for Scotland, Argentina and Spain were the medal winners.)
...and lastly from the Reuters feast of World Cup related pieces. Just when you thought there was no more new analysis left to find, no more untapped curiosities, and that everything knowable about the World Cup was now known, here comes the football player tattoo rankings.
This is wonderful from John Keegan, who visually taps into a fascinating dataset about NYC buildings: "The landscape of NYC changes so much that the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation updates a dataset of building footprint shapes weekly."
22. Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? | Financial Times
Sam Learner looks at the open source software that underpins our digital lives and how our obsession with Al code-writing tools is now overwhelming the web's "unsung human caretakers"
"Hong Kong is one of the fastest-ageing societies in the world, with its elderly population projected to exceed one-third of the total in the coming decades."
"A scrollytelling visualization exploring Lotte Reiniger’s work through 3 film databases, and how each platform’s purpose shapes the professional perception of her legacy" by Sarah-Mai Dang and Christian Laesser
Amanda provides some methods for helping to make sense of large values with a central argument being that its actually our ethical duty to be able to do this better: "But we can't continue to suck at this. Our world is increasingly moving towards extreme values: Damages from climate change, deaths due to genocide, wealth that knows no bounds. And we can't tackle them if we can't wrap our heads around the numbers."
29. Why I changed my mind on dual-axis charts | Datawrapper
Having seen Datawrapper launch two new chart types, including the dual-axis charts, Lisa follows up her previous 2018 article about why they are bad with an updated take explaining why she has since changed her mind on dual-axis charts but also offering further alternatives.
Congratulations to Frank on this work which represents the culmination of his Phd: "My final research project looked at the barriers that sighted practitioners face when authoring non-visual data experiences. We co-designed, built tooling, built a UI prototype, and ran a study."
Alberto gets quite philosophical in this thoughtful piece about how "charts can be lyrical... in a similar way that a work of art is lyrical: their creation can begin with an experience of awe... and continue with a desire to find a proper expression to inspire that awe in others."
32. On Data and Design: #33 Visual Journalism | Youtube
The 33rd talk event hosted by Superdot features Irene de la Torre Arenas, Jonas Oesch, Marco Hernandez - "three practitioners from the world’s leading newsrooms - the FT, NZZ and New York Times - to explore the process, constraints, and possibilities of modern visual storytelling."
Nice to see this newly launched blog from Jack Russell, who starts strongly with this early post investgiating "the uncanny ability of anyone who has grown up in Northern Ireland to discern whether someone is from the Catholic or Protestant community just by their name"
"Living in a moderately hilly town, I used to make a sport of finding a bike route from A to B while avoiding steep roads. I know other cyclists seek out steep hills for training purposes, but I’m just trying to get to my destination without arriving sweaty. I dreamed of a mapping app to help me, and finally I’ve made one. "
Shared via Rob Simmon, this is an early paper about the consequences of using continuous colour scales in mapping, written by W. R. Tobler and published in 'Geographical Analysis' in July 1973.
New course in the academy from Elsie Lee-Robbins and Eytan Adar which 'offers a framework to help designers make appropriate decisions in comunicativee visualizations'
Eric Rodenbeck, founder of Stamen Design, argues that "if you treat AI as a tool, you ask: how do I get the right answer? If you treat it as a medium, you ask: what happens if I push this?"
"In 2023 I asked what AI knows about data visualization. A more interesting (uncomfortable?) question turned out to be the mirror image: how much do the people who work with data every day actually know about it, and how much of that knowledge is decided for them by the tools they happen to use?"
40. How The Straits Times Turned World Cup History into Art | Newspaper Design
Another nice interview from TK Sajeev with Marcelo Duhalde, Deputy Interactive Graphics Editor at The Straits Times, about their 'World Cup Memorable Moments Game' which I featured in last month's newsletter.
"Color scales and the birth of viridis" by Helena Klara Jambor looks at how the viridis colour palette is (thankfully!) starting to replace the rainbow in scientific figures.
Latest developments, announcements, or announcements affecting the data viz world, as well as additional references to pieces covering broader data, tech, or design matters.
Found via Nathan Yau, the 'Burning Money' candle shows costs €30 and it shows you how much money you've burned as it melts through €1 interval markers.
"Graticule is an application for making frustration-free maps. I made it because I love maps, but the process of making them often leaves me wanting to tear my hair out."
...and in other new-features-in-established-tools news Flourish launch their new AI powered assistant providing 'guidance to help you refine your visualizations as you create – in plain language, with every change in your control' AND also announce the new Flourish Connector enabling you to make Flourish charts directly within AI tools.
48. John Margolies’ Archive of Americana Architecture | Open Culture
The Library of Congress has made 11,700 photos from John Margolies’ Archive of Americana Architecture free to download, use and re-mix: "linger as long as you’d like and do with these 11,700+ images as you will–make postcards, t‑shirts, souvenir placemats."
"The rig I'm on has put up first aid guides that were made with AI. Wouldn't bother with CPR there, would be more concerned by the fact is head isn't connected to his body"
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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Andy Kirk | Visualising Data
Independent Data Visualisation Expert
Subscribe to the 'Visualising Data Newsletter' to elevate your understanding with my monthly chronicle of the most insightful and delightful data viz content.
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