The power of perspective: Unlocking the secrets of data storytelling

As the founder and creative director of Cognitive, I have been using my artistic skills for over 25 years to try and help people gain insight into the narratives that interest and drive them.

My visual practice uses drawing and illustration combined with animation to create visual tapestries of information that explore some of today’s most urgent themes, covering topics from the worlds of economics, education, business, psychology and healthcare – to name a few. (Some people may be familiar with my work for the Royal Society of Arts and Manufacturing and the RSA Animate series.)

Cognitive was founded to help people and organisations reframe their narratives using the power of visualisations. We are always on the lookout for other viewpoints on how to tell engaging, visual stories and we are passionate about translating the complex world into simple, engaging and informative communications.

Information is Power: A data visualisation workshop

Richard, our MD, flagged a July masterclass and it was a no-brainer that I signed up to learn from data visualisation wizards Adam Frost and Tobias Sturt. I had no preconceived ideas about what the course would cover, but that is what made it exciting. I love learning new stuff.

We purchased two places on the course because we wanted to use the experience as a training exercise for one other in the team. I thought it would also be valuable to have a shared experience with a colleague, so we could cross-check information and the elements of the course we found to be useful. I was joined on the workshop by one of Cognitive’s illustrators, Tom Bradshaw.

As we were in the midst of the first wave of the pandemic, the masterclass was entirely digital. As a business, we had already started to adjust to life on Zoom, so it wasn’t a hard transition to cope with. In fact, I found it useful to come face-to-face with our fellow ‘students’ in the gallery view – it felt like a real group experience.

Adam led the first session, delving into the theory and process of data visualisation with clear, straight-forward advice from the shop floor and really getting into the mindset of a data visualiser from conception to realisation. This information was augmented by a useful set of slides.

After the practical session, Tobias explained how to transform data into visuals using real-world, best-practice examples, and taking us through some great case studies displaying the best infographics from the early days of print right up to present day interactive examples.

‘O’ what a popular name!

One of the most enjoyable portions of the class was the practical assignment. After the first session we were armed with just enough information to be dangerous.

Our assignment was to make a data visualisation from an excel spreadsheet dataset. The data related to the most popular baby names in the UK over the last few years. We were given half an hour before we were required to email our work to Adam and Tobias and reconvening in a group session, where our work was shared and discussed. It was really great to see how other people on the course tackled the task – using their newfound skills to create very different visual data-centric stories, some of them very clever indeed. The feedback from Adam and Tobias was helpful and reminded me of a ‘crit’ from art college.

As a group we analysed the spreadsheet as a group and were invited to encapsulate that data into an attention-grabbing headline. This interactive session resulted in a lot of energy and was the perfect springboard into our personal data visualisation tasks. Hearing how other people interpreted the data into a journalistic headline really helped frame how one could tell that particular story.

One often sees fridge magnets with myriad names in the gift shops of various attractions across the country. Tom decided to use this as a way of displaying the data. Interestingly the data revealed that both Olivia and Oliver topped the charts of favourite names. His decision to use yellow and green to differentiate genders was mentioned as an innovative choice, with Adam pointing out that “it’s great to see a move away from the pink and blue that is always used.” I’ll admit that I cringed a little, as this is exactly what I had done!

I also used the capital ‘O’s of the first letters of each name to represent a baby’s dummy and also to spell out each name – I structured the top 10 names in a simple list. I did get some feedback from Adam and Tobias – I forgot to put the data that shows the number of people who opt for each name – perhaps the clue was in the name of the workshop. Doh! I have rectified this in my illustration, but it was really good to get immediate feedback from Adam and Tobias.

Further reading

It was a really fulfilling experience and the experts were generous with their knowledge and the atmosphere was relaxed and informal. Adam and Tobias provided us with a link to a continually updated Google doc, which contains all the slides they presented, plus a further reading list.

Andrew and Tom attended a July masterclass which has now passed, but we run data visualisation workshops with Adam and Tobias all the time. Check our calendar for the latest launches, and sign up to our newsletter to be among the first to find out about our special offers.