22/ Elections, asteroids and Geolayers
Visual journalism tools and insights from October.
Welcome to the 22nd issue of Nuanced,
With all eyes on the elections this week, I’ll start by wishing you the best of luck if you’re going to be reporting on the event (and maybe taking the night shift). I’ve had a lot of fun in Svelte building our graphics dashboard for the event, using FiveThirtyEight’s fantastic data resources and the DPA Elections API.
Let’s get into last month’s discoveries!
Inspiration
This visual story by National Geographic on asteroids that are dangerous to us is completely bonkers. I can’t begin to understand how it was made.
My last visual story with NZZ is now available in English. This project represents the culmination of months of perseverance from a diverse team of talents. We hit a lot of roadblocks and kept pushing, I’m proud of the result.
Decoded
In November I’ll be interviewing Sam Joiner for an episode of Decoded. Sam leads the award-winning visual stories and investigations team at the Financial Times.
Boone Loves Video is my new favorite Youtube Channel. Jason produces the best content for map animations, period. Grateful for the effort he’s invested into these tutorials, which are publicly available.
I’ll also give a shoutout to The Litte of Visualization by Andy Kirk, a blog series highlighting small design innovations that have outsized impacts on visual effectiveness.
A couple months ago I interviewed Alvin Chang to discuss the making of his Pudding articles, unfortunately I forgot to embed the video in the last issue so I’m including it here!
Useful tools
These are the tools I’ve been recommended over the last month:
Overpass Turbo to harvest geodata from OpenStreetMaps
The Geolayers App is phenomenal, I’m finding it much easier than the After Effects plugin.
PDF Plumber by Jeremy Singer-Vine
VizCritique Pro is a useful way to get perspective on the fly
Mr. Data Converter when the file is too large for AI
Wildly excited about Adobe Substance Viewer, if anyone has experience using it on projects I’d love to hear.
Thanks for reading!