Data visualization resources
A list of tools and resources I’ve found helpful and share with a data visualization class I teach every year.
Color palettes and pickers
- Color brewer: Color picker for cartography (or even other visualizations).
- Chroma.js: for choosing balanced, linear colors.
- i want hue: choose colors for your categorical palette.
- Colorate: color scheme tool for designers and developers.
- Viridis color palette: For a nice color palette in R.
- Colors in R: R colors cheatsheet.
- ColorZilla: color tools available as a browser extension.
- Viz Palette: colors in action.
Color blindness simulators and accessibility testers
- Color blindness simulator: See how image appear with different types of color blindness. You can upload your files as well.
- Color Oracle: Another great color blindness simulator.
- WebAIM color contrast checker: To test your color/text choices for accessibility
- Monsido color contrast checker
- Colour Contrast Checker
- Additional color contrast checkers & analyzers
Books
- Data Visualization. A practical introduction: A very good book by Kieran Healy at Duke University.
- Fundamentals of Data Visualization: Great guide to making visualizations that accurately reflect the data, tell a story, and look professional. By Claus Wilke.
Courses
- Data Visualization course by Dr. Andrew Heiss
- Visualization part of Stat 545: The Stat 545 course website is a useful resource for R users interested in exploring, grooming, and visualizing their data.
Useful online resources
- From Data to Viz: Excellent site that leads you to the most appropriate graph for your data. It links to the code to build it and lists common caveats you should avoid.
- Visual vocabulary: A poster to assist designers and journalists to select the optimal symbology for data visualisations, by the Financial Times Visual Journalism Team.
- R Graph Catalog: Different graph types along with code in R.
- Subtleties of Color: A 6 part series on use of color to display data by Robert Simmon, data visualizer at NASA.
- Flowing data: for all things visualization.
- Using fonts/typography in presentations: Super helpful twitter thread by Matt Carter
- Friendly Guide to Colors in Data Visualisation
- What to consider when choosing colors for data visualization
- Data + Design: Introduction to preparing and visualizing information