my first d3 workshop
using observable, help me practice? plus new videos & streams
I’m signed up to give my first d3 workshop at a big online conference in late October and I’m excited to be trying out a different approach from what I’ve done in the past! Check out this 1 minute overview to quickly get a sense of the content:
I’ve put together this outline of the material, but what I’m really excited about is this student workbook that I’m hoping folks in the workshop will fork and fill out as we go.
The goal of the workshop is to give a solid foundation in web-based data visualization with d3.js along with a taste of building more advanced animated and interactive visualizations.
With Observable it will be easy to avoid a ton of painful setup, allowing us to jump straight into visualizing rather than worrying about local servers, local data, file paths, coding editors. I’m hoping that the starting points I chose strike a balance between providing motivation and providing enough context. D3 covers a ton of underlying browser technologies as well as a programming language many in the audience may not be super familiar with. I’m hoping we can cover enough basics to keep moving while leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for deeper exploration when folks want to apply this to their own data.
Test Run: October 9th
I’d like to run a test of the workshop Friday, October 9th at 1pm EST. If you’re interested in spending around 3 hours learning some d3 and giving me feedback I’m hoping to get a small group of 5 folks to try it out together.
💌 Reply to this email if you want to join! 💌
Video Process
I’m getting really into making and editing videos lately. I’ve always enjoyed playing with motion, it’s one of the reasons I love using d3 so much. I consider myself an amateur video editor, I learned basics of Adobe Premiere many years ago and occasionally play with those skills. Lately I’ve been using LumaFusion on the iPad to edit timelapsed screen recordings. You can see the result in the workshop trailer at the top of this email.
Here is another attempt I made where I did a voiceover as well. Doing the voiceover is actually way more work than everything else combined, and pretty hard to get right.
Instead I’ve been putting music from friends behind the edited down videos. EJ Fox actually scored the beat to the workshop trailer in Logic:
EJ deserves extra shoutouts for giving me a ton of feedback on my edits, and encouraging me to hand draw the thumbnail. It’s really nice having someone on a similar creative wavelength to resonate with!
I’m hoping to make more videos like this! It’s been really interesting to expand my expressive capabilities into video and motion. I’m making more gifs and small videos, for everything from data visualizations to my son Maxwell’s drawings:
I’ve begun collecting quite a few ffmpeg commands that feel like superpowers:
If anyone is interested I can share these somewhere more accessible.
Coding with Fire
EJ and I are still streaming Coding With Fire every Sunday! You can see the results of past streams in this collection of notebooks. The more we stream the more we are figuring out what works for us. We are excited to be having more guests come on and build with us. Tonight Colin Megill is joining us to visualize data around the US Senate.
Next week Fabian Iwand is going explore programatic animation with us, look what kind of stuff comes out of his mind!
Follow us on Twitch to get notified when we go live!
I'm interested in joining the test run, but there is no email link, so I'll ask here. Is there a spot available?