Thursday, June 7, 2018

Soccer, tools, a course, and a new book

News about my ongoing collaboration with the Google News Initiative —see all projects, and an article about them— slowed down a bit on the first half of 2018, but they are about to get more frequent. First, this coming week I begin a brand-new Massive Open Online Course, a 4-week intro to elementary principles of visualization. The course is aimed at absolute beginners, and you can still sign up; more than 4,000 people from more than 100 countries have already done so.

We're also preparing to launch visualizations about the elections in Mexico and Brazil, the U.S. midterms, and a few free software tools that I think you'll really like. I can't say much about them for now, other than they are similar to Flourish in the sense that they let you generate visuals, interactives, and animations that up to this point you could only make through code.

(This is all happening, by the way, while I work on my new book. I need to turn in the draft to the publisher before September, and the book will be launched in 2019. No, it's not The Insightful Art —that'll likely come next— but my first non-fiction hardcover for the general public. I'm excited. See a sneak peek of one page.)

Anyway, the latest visualization coming out of the Google News Initiative explores the World Cup. It was designed by Polygraph, and it lets you see which players and teams are most popular all over the world. I really like its simplicity, it's intentionally Googlish color palette —and the animated players: