On the 23rd March we in the UK were placed on lockdown. Along with millions of others in the country, I was furloughed in April. Aside from our three daughters' home schooling, I knew I needed some kind of design project to keep me occupied. Being busy and creative undoubtedly has a positive affect on my mental health, and helps me to stay enthusiastic and energetic for my family, which is especially important during these troubled times.
As a Data Visualisation Analyst, I started thinking about the kind of work I do, both on a daily basis as well as in my spare time. I had personal profiles on sites such as GitHub and Tableau Public, I belonged to and contributed to Slack channels including the Data Visualisation Society (DVS) and R4DS and I'd taken part in data viz projects such as Makeover Monday and Tidy Tuesday. I also regularly made data art including a submission of work for a masters module in Visual Communication Practice.
Thinking about how much of my work remained unseen, stuck on my desktop, reminded me of a post by David Robinson, data scientist, author and educator, previously of Stack Overflow and DataCamp .
I'd never had a website or online portfolio, primarily because I've worked with the same company for many years and have never done freelance work. My furlough seemed like an ideal opportunity to design one.
Sharing work isn't always easy, and it challenges perfectionist tendencies, but whatever type of work it is (graphic, art, blog), just getting it out there means a high score on David Robinson's 'valuableness' scale (bottom right).
Data-patterns is currently very much a work in progress, but it feels great to finally have a creative repository for my data visualisation.
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