In my work in data communication, I find the following resources helpful. Feel free to share widely or suggest additions based on what I have. Suggestions are welcome.
- Plain Language Guidelines. This is a helpful and hierarchical list of guidelines that really helps move beyond "I know it when I see it" and systematize plain language writing. Notably on this site, Scientists need plain language, a great overview of why plain language benefits communication products among the highly-educated. And, Use Simple Phrases is a great list of problem words.
- America's Health Literacy. Research and data from HHS.
- George Orwell's 6 rules for writing, from Politics and the English Language. In particular,
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarousis a helpful reminder that consistency should be a tool not a prison. - Race to Justice Language Guide.
- Evelina Judeikyte's The Plot newsletter is one of the better sets of writing about data storytelling that I've found.
- USCIS's plain language videos are great. Funny, brief, and informative videos on specific plain language techniques. Check out Put your main message first and Active voice.
There are a lot of visualization platforms but these are the ones I use most often.
- Datawrapper makes making interactive, well-designed visualizations fast and easy. Their blog details new features and techniques, and their documentation is thorough.
- Vega and Vega-Lite allow highly customizeable visualizations through json spec. Their online editor and examples are a good place to start. Helpful tutorial.
- Introducing Arquero. Arquero is a JS library for importing data into the browser as tables and manipulating it. Helpful for client-side data processing and manipulation, to prep data for visualization. More.
There are lots of visualization guidelines out there. I find the Evergreen Visualization Checklist to be the most useful. I made an interactive version, here. Additionally:
- The Science of Visual Data Communication: What Works: a lengthy and powerful paper touching many aspects of evidence-based, effective data viz design.
- VisHealth: "a scientifically-vetted style guide for communicating health data."
- Tufte's 6 principles remain useful: show comparisons, show causality, use multivariate data, integrate evidence or other media, establish credibility, and focus on content.
- What to consider when using text in data visualizations from Datawrapper's blog. An excellent run-down of decisions around text (microcopy) in visualizations.
- Why Government Websites Often Struggle To Meet People's Needs. A great run-down of common technical and cultural challenges within government agencies.
- Decolonizing Data Vis
- Tweets on data vis's role in empire to military industrial complex
- Where Is the Rush to Visualize the Public Health Crisis of Racism?
- How not to visualize like a racist
- How do you visualize inequality without promoting it?. Interesting research on how visualization modes work with regard to racism and stereotyping.
- CDC Clear Communication Index. This is information design principles applied to designing health communication material. I often think about components of this apply to data visualization, too. Here's my one-page app interactive version.
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- How to Iterate on a CDC Health Advisory Graphic. A strong before-and-after that brings in familiar concepts. This doesn't come from a perspective of specifically communicating health data, but the original map and styles are familiar in public health.
- Collaborative on Media and Messaging for Health and Social Policy: a well-curated list of interdisciplinary academic research on health comms.
- Felt is a really cool map service. Sort of like Datawrapper but for maps - with built-in base layers, really easy interface.
- Mapshaper lets you edit and convert shapefile, geojson, topojson, and other geo files.
- Geojson.io lets you draw areas and export them as geojson.
- json formatter does what it says on the tin.
- NYC Geography Files.
- Datawrapper: how to pick more beautiful colors for your visualization. Accessible theory, practical guidance, and good resources.
- Palleton. Interactive pallet tool
- Coolers.co. Color pallet generator.
- Colorbrewer. Classic map-focused pallet generator.
- Color-Hex. Useful reference.
- Adobe Color Palette generator.
- Wireframe.cc. Easy, in-browser wireframing tool.
- Gestalt Principles: there are lots and lots of resources around the internet on these. None are as perfect as I wish they were, so here's the Wikipedia article.
- Civic Service Design Tools and Tactics. A nice guide for bringing service design into government work.
- Usability.gov. Lots of nuts-and-bolts research and guidance for usability work.
- A lightweight approach to data viz accessibility - a microsite with a simple approach for incorporating accessible tables.
- Smashing Magazine: A Complete Guide to Accessible Front-End Components
- Accessibility for Interactive Web Maps. Part of MN.IT's fantastic suite of documentation on accessibility and web mapping.
- A11y Project: Compliance Checklist. Great guide.
- Tota11y for Chrome. Useful plugin.
- Github best practices. I appreciate opinionated guides, even if I don't share the opinion.
- Github Flow. A flexible, simple workflow, slightly simplified compared to git-flow.
- 15 rules for communicating at Github. While I don't work in a technology-exclusive area and certainly don't follow all of these practices, I like a close, critical look at what tools you use, and when and why you use them.
- JavaScript 30 is a well-paced set of lessons that has helped me expand my JavaScript vocabulary.
- Codecademy: JavaScript. Great for learning the fundamentals.
- Mike Dane. I've used his Youtube tutorials for JS, Hugo, Jekyll, and more. They're well-paced and definitely get you moving.
- Regis Philibert's blog helps shed light on how Hugo works.
- GridEd(itor). A handy little grid code generator.
- Automate the Boring Stuff With Python. I haven't dug deeply into this but from scanning it, the fact that it's written for the 'lay programmer' is appealing.