"The fact then that since I can't have data on paper when I am sketching what comes to mind and designing a data visualization, I feel that it is very helpful to explore visual features and visual aggregations that start exactly from what you have in mind, and that can serve to open questions on the data itself. I see this as a shortcut from your head to the final piece of data visualization."
Three distinct phases for me in my design process:
- A first phase when I am interested in the main macro categories of data we are analyzing;
- second phase where I just focus on the singular elements, the entry points that we have, to figure out which shapes, colors, features we might invent to better represent them
- Final phase where I would structure what I’d expect to finally create, not in illustrator (digital format), but on paper
