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Episode #147: Lazaro Gamio
149 Plays6 years ago
Lazaro Gamio is a deputy managing editor at Axios, where he oversees a group of visual journalists that make charts, maps, interactive graphics and editorial illustrations. He previously worked at the Washington Post as an assignment editor on the graphics...
The post Episode #147: Lazaro Gamio appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Spotlight
00:00:11
Speaker
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. Thanks so much for tuning back into the show. On this week's episode, I'm really excited to welcome Lazar Ogamio from Axios. If you haven't checked out the Axios site, you really should. They are doing some really cool work.
00:00:26
Speaker
with data and data visualization, which of course where I focus on, but also on the news reporting as a whole. Laz leads the data visualization team over there at Axios. He's worked at the Washington Post and the Miami Herald.
Axios Website and Visualization Approach
00:00:39
Speaker
And so we talk about the work he and his team are doing over there, some of the non-standard graphs that they're using, and also about the sort of non-traditional different type of layout and feel at the Axios site.
00:00:52
Speaker
You'll also notice that we have a little fun at the beginning of this episode. Sometimes I just cut that stuff out when I have a little conversation with folks before we actually do the interview, but we had such a good time this time around. I thought I would just leave that in for you. So, you know, hang in there for a couple minutes until we get to the actual content.
Supporting the Podcast
00:01:10
Speaker
One last thing before I get to the interview, if you would like to support the show, please consider leaving a review on iTunes or on your favorite podcast provider. Or if you'd like to become a Patreon supporter, that would be great. Just a couple months, a couple bucks a month.
00:01:25
Speaker
will help me cover the costs of sound editing and transcription costs and also of course to pay for all the web development and web hosting needs. I've put links to both those iTunes and the Patreon page on the show notes page so please do consider supporting the show. So here is my chat with Lazaro Gamio from Axios.
Lazaro Gamio's Journey to Axios
00:01:48
Speaker
I'm not even going to introduce, cause I'll do that later. I'll just stitch it on. Sweet. And the only rule is like, and I'm bad at this too, like not trying to pick a distance. So maintain the same distance. Maintain the distance, but other than that, there's not no rule. Okay. Um, I'll do this one. This feels like I can maintain. I can maintain this for 20 minutes. All right. Maybe, maybe not.
00:02:08
Speaker
Hold the fire back. How long can you hold it? How long can you hold it, right? I am extremely fidgety. I cannot stay in the same position for like 15 seconds. Do you need something? Do you need something to like, I've got stress balls and stuff? You know, that actually would be fantastic. I've got the earth. Oh, yes. And I've got this from visually. Oh, look at that. Yeah, I just love to squeeze the earth between my fingers. This is a metaphor. It feels strong. It's a metaphor. All right. All right. All right.
00:02:36
Speaker
All right, let's just do this. Let's just give it like five seconds of quiet for the air so we can pull the air out of it. Sure. And then we'll just start. That's fine. Yeah. It's like December, right? Oh, I feel like everything's just like forever. It's a reflective time of the year. This is a perfect time to do a podcast about what we do for a living, right? So this will come out right, I think I'm going to do like second week of January. Great. Just plenty of time to look for a new job after my bosses hear this and go like, what the fuck are you doing?
00:03:06
Speaker
Okay curse. Oh, yeah, you totally curse. Oh, you can do whatever you want. Yeah, this is great with a little explicit That's great. How many of them have the explicit thing? Uh Just one really him Reese. I think is the only one who swore that is bullshit
00:03:21
Speaker
Cause you know, all these fucking people curse every single day. All the time. Yeah, like I can't. They try to be, they try to, you know, they try to hold it in on them. But you told me this is not a professional podcast. I mean, it's professional, but it's not, you know, I mean, look at me. I'm just like, you know, I'm slapping microphones down. So for listeners at home, John's not wearing pants.
00:03:44
Speaker
You know, it's like doing a webinar. You know, it's Pencil's teaching. As long as you don't stand up halfway through, you just have to look it on top. That's okay. Oh man, life is a facade.
00:03:58
Speaker
Um, why don't we, we can just, let me just start, we can start. I mean, we're already started. Yeah. We can just all put all this in there. I'll just have you like, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Um, do you want to tell folks about you? Yeah. So, uh, I'm pretty sure you can just read my name on the website, but I'm Laz. Um, I lead the visuals team at Axios and I used to work at the Washington post. So I was an assignment editor at the graphics department there. Um, now my job is a little different, right? So like, uh,
00:04:24
Speaker
I went to Axios and I was like, hey, can I just make charts? And they're
Team Structure at Axios
00:04:28
Speaker
like, hey, how about you edit this team? And I was like, okay. Well, that, you know, I, um, one of my problems is I never say no. So yeah, you know, here I am. Um, and the team is a little different than what I did at the post because I'm in charge of both database and illustration.
00:04:44
Speaker
So I'm sort of helping, you know, art direct the look of the editorial illustrations that appear on the site and also, you know, edit the data visit appear. So it's like I'm using both sides of my brain, right? Like the sort of, you know, art side and then the sort of more technical side that, you know, you have to employ for database. How many people are on the team? And then what's the split between like the illustrator side and then the database developer side? Sure. So right now in total, we are eight folks, including myself. So I'm the visuals editor. We have four folks doing database.
00:05:15
Speaker
Those are Chris Knipe, Harry Stevens, Andrew Witherspoon, and Neema Ahmed. And then we have three folks doing editorial illustrations. So that's Sarah Grillo, Rebecca Scissor, and Ida Amr.
00:05:26
Speaker
So it's a four three split right now and we're hiring one more person for the other side Was it that size when you got there? No, we started and I it was three of us Yeah, so in two years since you know Axios is as old as the Trump administration. So about 10 million years. Yeah And you know since we started two years ago, we've essentially tripled the size of the team. Yeah, which is fun
00:05:50
Speaker
So tell me about the difference then between since you've done like the big, standard Washington Post 100 years. Yeah. And then and now like, I mean, not a startup, but essentially a startup news. Yeah, we're a young newsroom, like, we're an old startup, old startup. Yeah. How do you view the differences between the two?
00:06:08
Speaker
Yes, it's interesting.
Challenges of a Startup Environment
00:06:10
Speaker
I think when I left the post, I was looking for something a little bit more dynamic, which is why Axios was so attractive to me. There are no rules. There was no bureaucracy, no nothing, and there wasn't. It was a wild west. I sort of just did whatever I want and we had success. Now that we've built more structure,
00:06:30
Speaker
You know, it's still very different, I think, from what your traditional newsroom is like. I think the biggest difference between the work I do at Axios and the work I've done in the past is just that the format at Axios is very different, right? Like, we're all about the smart brevity and keep things small and concise, which, you know, I never really understood the luxury of having space, right? Of like having a blank slate, you know, every time you open like a graphics template, like at a big shop,
00:06:59
Speaker
It's like, oh, I can do whatever I want. I can have like a big photo, like a little tiny chart here and like just sort of like take my time, right? Because we're taking this like very sort of like rigorous reader first approach where we know for a fact that like when readers open a website, they most of the time would just close it without reading anything, right? And if they do read, they'll maybe get past like one scroll, right? So taking that rigorous approach,
00:07:26
Speaker
means that we have to be equally rigorous, as rigorous as we are in the writing with our visualizations. So what's the one chart that we can do to sort of communicate what we want to communicate?
00:07:38
Speaker
And that's it, right? Which is kind of hard, right? It's like it's so much easier to do more than it is to do less. And there's so much time that we spend just trying to figure out what shouldn't be there, which is a different type of labor.
Static vs Interactive Graphs
00:07:54
Speaker
So I want to come back to the look of Axios because it is like
00:07:58
Speaker
Really different from the yeah this point on essentially more versus less So yeah, I'll give you a statement that I gave you a previous guess and sure, you know, okay, so a tactical considerations aside It is harder to create a good effective static graph than a good effective interactive. This is just true or false Maybe
00:08:21
Speaker
True or false with an explain your answer below? Sure. I mean, I think, so they're not really inherently different, right? If you think about it, like an interactive chart is a static graph until you interact with it. Yeah. So it could just be shitty. You know, there you go. You can put explicit on it now. So it can just be a shitty chart, you know, the same way like a static chart is a shitty chart. I think the tools that you have, you know, maybe make it easier to make a better chart
00:08:50
Speaker
because something like Adobe Illustrator is much more expressive than D3 can be. D3 is expressive in how you can use it to do anything you want, but then the annotation layer is a little bit more laborious. I think technically, if you're talking about the know-how required to make an interactive chart, yeah, definitely it is much harder to do it in D3. Once you've got your skills in place... Well, I guess some people would argue that Illustrator is
00:09:19
Speaker
or InDesign, like those are hard ones. I mean, they're collected menu, but they are heavy dense tools. Yeah. What's the easiest tool to make a
Tools for Data Visualization at Axios
00:09:29
Speaker
chart in?
00:09:29
Speaker
I mean, this is like an ongoing question now. It should be easy. It should be easy to a point. Like I want the tool to allow you to do everything. Like there's always a sort of maybe goal that you'd have a tool that like you could do the data analysis and you can make the graphs and you could do the interactivity and make good design. And I worry about like that tool, like the one to rule them all. Yeah.
00:09:53
Speaker
I don't want statisticians to be making design decisions easily. And people who don't know anything, don't know enough about data to be doing statistical analysis. It's easy enough now to do a regression, but not everybody should be ready. So what's the easiest tool? I don't know. So what do you guys use?
00:10:12
Speaker
We essentially just use two things, like we use Illustrator, we have a very robust AI-2HML rig that we design each chart five times. It's like we have three mobile versions and two, one tablet, one desktop. And then that all, from there, we essentially make flat versions for every imaginable platform we can think of. And then our interactives are all D3 or they're just JavaScript.
00:10:39
Speaker
And what about the data analysis part? So from there, I work a lot in Python. Some folks work in node.
00:10:48
Speaker
You know, we do a lot of R2. So just depends. Everybody has their own skill set. And like, you know, as long as you get to, you know, where you need to go, it doesn't matter what you use. So how does the, um, the illustrator side work? Well, because I'm not as familiar with that. Like if I have to make five different versions, is that a manual process? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So you're creating a new art board of the right dimensions. Oh, yeah. Well, we have a template. That would be madness to try to do that each time. Nobody wants to work that hard. Yeah. And so what are the templates? So you have templates in.
00:11:18
Speaker
All the all the style decisions are all yeah, I mean it's all like they're a lot of their good sort of guidelines there We call it guardrails, right? Yeah, so like all of them, you know, we have right typefaces right colors I think we've made I mean, I'd say on a given week we make about 20 visits. So like we
00:11:38
Speaker
We're a high-volume shop, so doing that, we have a good corpus to lean back on and be like, how did we do this the last time we did it? We have a design language that is ongoing and evolving and everybody is participating in. Does that include the reporters as well? Do they get to chime in and say, I wish this chart had a different look to it or something like that? When we get feedback from reporters, I think
00:12:06
Speaker
Feedback, like I don't like red, is not feedback, right? Like that is just like, okay, cool. Yeah, that's just a complaint. Yeah, exactly. I think, I think feedback from, you know, non-vis people is valuable and
00:12:18
Speaker
engaging the readability of the chart. We're like, I don't get this. If you have an expert in a given field that asks you for a chart and they don't understand what you did, I think it is time to reevaluate what you're doing. I think we have, again, a pretty robust feedback process. We're really big on Slack. You're making a chart and I post it in a room and then everybody yells at you for five minutes.
00:12:43
Speaker
And then often you'll show it to the reporter and then it's in a really good spot by them and there shouldn't be any problems. But obviously a lot of those discussions should happen beforehand. Lots of dialogue makes good work.
00:12:58
Speaker
Let me ask you about the bigger
B-swarm Plots and Their Benefits
00:13:00
Speaker
projects. Maybe they're not bigger projects. You especially, I think, I've seen a lot of the stuff that you do, I've seen B-Sworn plots a lot. I think that's mostly, well maybe it's not mostly, but I've seen a lot of B-Sworn plots. Yeah. It's a 2018. It's a chart of the year. The trend is dying. What do you like about the B-Sworn?
00:13:20
Speaker
I think a big problem with any time you do a dot in a vis, you're going to have clustering. It's a big problem with scatter plots. There was a whole Twitter debate that I may be partooking about occlusion. So you have a lot of occlusion. So B swarm plots solve that because you can see each dot and you don't have to worry about hiding information. Now obviously,
00:13:48
Speaker
They can also be really problematic, especially when one of your axes, you're relying on one of the axes, X or Y, to encode data, and you're obviously distorting it. Yes. Right? But I think they're good in that they give you the overall sense of the shape, which is optimal point. You get all the individual points and then the whole shape. Yeah. Do you think people get that? Or do you think your readers get that? I think they do, because I think your normal reader isn't going to
00:14:16
Speaker
put a ruler up to the screen and be like, hmm, this one's off by six pixels. Normal people don't do that. We're not normal. But even we don't do that. Yeah, exactly. I think you have so much power to be exact that often the need to be exact outweighs the necessity to just be clear.
00:14:39
Speaker
I think it's more important to be clear than to be exact all the time. As long as you have a good reason for it and as long as you can explain it. So there are other non-standard, I don't know what the right term is for this, but non-standard, let's just say, non-standard charts, like outside the lines and bars and pies. Yeah, I mean, lines and charts and pies are like, well, we never do pies. It's a good crime against humanity. But I think lines and bars are your meat and potatoes.
00:15:09
Speaker
Because we have this sort of space limitation, our sort of gold standard is make one really crazy thing at the top.
00:15:20
Speaker
We often just experiment, right? Like just like, Hey, what's the weirdest chart that I can put up there? Like I've done a couple of connected scatter plots that, you know, some of them have been good. A lot of them haven't, you know, I'll be the first one to tell you, uh, we do like a lot of non-standard encoding. Um, I made this like wildfires thing a while ago. Chris Knipe did this like really great hurricanes piece. Um, when he started that just shows, I think like, what is it like wind speed over time? Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah.
00:15:48
Speaker
So we're really big into, I think having that space constraint is just forced to be very creative about how we encode. That obviously creates a density problem, where it's just a lot to read. This is a constant sort of struggle when you're making charts.
00:16:07
Speaker
charts are meant to be looked at because of their work of their visual. So you look at it first before you read it. So whenever you have a chart that you have to read sort of ingest all the information, you're asking the reader for a lot. So we're constantly trying to tread that line. We're like, hey, if you look at this, you'll get a lot from it, but you have to make that investment.
00:16:30
Speaker
So explain a little bit about the layout, because when I go to Axios.com, it's definitely a different look than Washington Post, right? It's not set in the three or four columns with the thing at the top and the pictures everywhere. It's more sparse. It's a little more direct, maybe? I don't know.
Smart Brevity in Storytelling
00:16:48
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, our sort of thing is smart brevity, trademark. And our goal is to provide the best information for people so they can get smarter and faster. It's about having that...
00:17:00
Speaker
respect for the reader to just say like, hey, you need to know this and here's why it matters and if you want to read more, click this button and if not, move on to the next thing, right? So that is the goal. It is ruthlessly reader first. Yes. We're like, you know, we're not going to make you read, you know, 800 words of B matter.
00:17:18
Speaker
Yeah, you know after the first or second paragraph so you can know more if you want to go deeper, right? And we we do that on every single story where we have a button right then you can just read more reading Yeah, right and that is it. I mean that is that is the fundamental mission Yeah, there's a lot of information out there and we're trying to deliver it to readers in the best way possible So I know there's the graphics team
00:17:41
Speaker
You're thinking a little bit differently, packing more in a tighter spot, but I imagine it's an even bigger switch for some of the reporters. It is tough to write short. It is something that we're constantly perfecting. It's like short with the option of long.
00:18:01
Speaker
Yeah, but even the long is like maybe 400 words, right? So we're putting essentially two paragraphs before the button, right? And then even getting it down to like 300, 400, 500 is long, right?
00:18:18
Speaker
So, yeah, you just have to learn to, you know, you just have to sort of kill your darlings, right? Like, what is essential here, right? Like, are you telling people something they already know, right? Like, do you really need to say this, right? I think, you know, in charts, it's like, are you putting this so you can feel okay with what you're doing, right? Like, really long notes. You know, it's like, I'm going to caveat this seven ways. And it's like, well, it is or it isn't, right? Yeah. So tell me what I want. Exactly.
00:18:47
Speaker
What about the bigger pieces? So you're doing like 20 visits a week. Yeah, smaller things. Smaller things. What about how do you organize and create the bigger projects? Sure. So I think our benchmark for bigger projects is usually they should fall in one of three buckets. One, you should do a big project so you can learn something technically new. That is important for us as people who make charts where
00:19:16
Speaker
you should be challenging yourself technically, constantly. So a big project can fall into that category.
00:19:22
Speaker
Two, are you going to be doing something unique with a data set that already exists? This is where maybe you can push the field of data visualization forward by coming up with a crazy new chart. That is worth doing. And three is, is the data newsworthy? Do you have data that nobody else has either because we get exclusively from somebody or you constructed it by yourself? So you have those three buckets. Those are the three check marks that I look for.
00:19:52
Speaker
When I say yes or no to a bigger project and then from there, we just have to make time. We run a daily news cycle. I think the longest we spend on a project is maybe like two or three weeks, which is not a long time. I worked on projects that have lasted a year.
00:20:12
Speaker
So once we say yes, it's like, well, let's make the time. And then, I mean, it's no different than a small one. You just work and you show and you work more. And then eventually we get to a place where we have buy-in from everybody else and we just publish it.
00:20:27
Speaker
get all the likes on Twitter. There's always the goal. Which is the goal. We're all working for everybody else on Twitter. So your staff will pitch ideas to you? Do you ever get stuff from other parts of the universe? Yeah, of course. Everything is just percolating. I think what's one of the benefits of working here at a small place is it's a village. Everybody talks all the time. And there's a lot of contact between the graphics folks and the reporters. In those situations, you'll have ideas that bubble up or ideas that bubble down.
00:20:55
Speaker
This idea is coming from everywhere. This is not enough time. Just need to slow it down. Yeah, that's not going to happen. You had mentioned earlier about Illustrator and making these multiple versions for mobile, desktop, and tablet.
Design Challenges for Interactive Charts
00:21:10
Speaker
What about interactives? I know you can code them so they're responsive, but how do you think about
00:21:18
Speaker
People on their phone interacting with the thing versus people on the desktop interacting. Well, that's something you know, it's what I said before it's like every interactive chart is a Non-interactive chart until you interact with it, right? So like when we make interactives first of all interactives are expensive. So
00:21:34
Speaker
If you're gonna make something interactive, it better blow my fucking mind. Like, you better click a button and literally change my life, right? Like, you can't, you know, I mean, we do this all the time where like, we'll make an interactive that has like light interactivity where you can hover over a dot and, you know, get information on stuff. But it should work well without that. Like, a good interactive chart has to be a good static chart first.
00:22:02
Speaker
So when I'm scrolling through it on my phone and I see the scatterplot, I get the point, even though I'm not going to try to point my thumb on that little point. You have to assume that people will not click. So I think if you are forcing a reader to interact with something,
00:22:19
Speaker
It has to be spectacular. That's the benchmark, changing my fucking life. And you're seeing that on usage and page views and stuff like that? Yeah, this is known. Nobody clicks on anything. People just scroll. If you spent three months coding up an interactive, I'm sorry, nobody's clicked on it. This is the truth.
00:22:44
Speaker
You know, and I think the reason to do it still is like I think Greg O'Reich had a nice long, you know, write up on why you should still interact with things. I think it's good to provide a high level of transparency to readers. Like there are readers who like will look at your source data and like call you out on your bullshit. And I think those are great readers. Like those are very engaged readers. And you want to give them that level of insight into like what exactly you are doing.
00:23:13
Speaker
So it's a trade-off. Luckily, we are amazing at it. Well, obviously. Yeah, I don't sound like an asshole. But we're pretty good at making interactive stuff very quickly. We've made them enough now, or we have enough tools to bring it up pretty quickly. But you also give up the sort of expressivity that you have with a tool like Illustrator. You want an arrow and a label here. Right, and that's the exact spot of this. Exactly.
00:23:42
Speaker
We make it work. Right. We talked about these forms. Yes. And we talked about connected scatter plots and scatter plots. So what other crazy non-standard chart forms do you like that you think people get? Because I always come back to you when I talk to like students and especially, you know, professionals, they're like show them a dot plot or something, right?
00:24:06
Speaker
put that in my report because my manager would never get it. Let's look at the New York Times. They have this scatter plot or bubble plot with like a million points on it. The average New York Times reader doesn't immediately get that until they engage with it a little bit and then they learn the chart type. So are there other chart types that you like to use that you
00:24:26
Speaker
think people now or you know your regular readers especially like getting. I think one that I've seen that sort of I think oh I should probably move back that is crossing the threshold is a cartogram. I think if if you made a cartogram like five years ago like I think you would still get like whoa what is this like right the United States that's bullshit no right yeah yeah
00:24:49
Speaker
But now, I think back to these midterms, most people just defaulted to the mid-partogram view, which I think is fucking fantastic. It is the better way to look at congressional results. And that makes me happy, like equal area representation plan doesn't vote. So that's one that I think is bubbling up. Do you think those translate? I always wonder about these translating to the world.
00:25:15
Speaker
Like I did for fun, I did like a tile grid map of the world, which is stupid. I mean, Russia can't be the same size as Barbados. That's kind of ridiculous. So do they scale up, you think, to the world? I think it depends. The reason they work for political data is because often one congressional district is one congressional district. So there is a one-to-one thing regardless of land. I think when you have world data,
00:25:43
Speaker
It depends what you're mapping. Are you mapping something where one country truly is one country and it has equal weight? And what data is Barbados equal to Russia? Nothing. And it's actually, a congressional district card gram is much more complex in the world because it's like, what, 435 versus how many countries are there, like 250? 250 something, maybe 28 or something like that, yeah.
00:26:11
Speaker
I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I just, you know, I find the cartograms of the world, usually the ones that I see that I kind of like are, they're essentially bubbles. There's just a packed bubble map. And it's not even about the geography per se, they're just like, here's the North American countries are here in blue, and Asian countries are in purple. And it's like, it's not even so much about getting the geography really remotely right. It's just like within the region. Yeah.
00:26:39
Speaker
Well, obviously, it's like a US-centered view to begin with. The US is over here on the left, and Asia's over there on the bottom right, and Oceania's down the bottom, right? I think, you know, what it needs is, like, I think eventually somebody will figure out a really great way of doing it, and then we're all going to copy that person. And then that'll be the standard. And that's it, you know? Right.
00:26:58
Speaker
I mean, the same way, I mean, even even the congressional district card rooms, like they're like, they're still very, what's the word boutique? Yeah, everybody's got their own cut, right? Which is nice. It's nice. So I agree that it's nice. It also is like, if I look at
00:27:16
Speaker
You know, I know we're not supposed to look at Mercator maps, but you know, if I look at a Mercator map projection, I know where Virginia is. Yeah. If I look at a tile grid map, you know, Axios is going to be different than the Post and the Times and FiveThirtyEight, like, and that's not the way geography works. Maybe we should just standardize it. Maybe there should be like a Carter Graham Consortium. We should just agree. Everybody just decides we're going to do this one. That's it. And then we'll just fight for two weeks and not agree on anything.
00:27:44
Speaker
Take one. That's it. But they all have their own little thing, right? Yeah. I don't know. I think it is at a nice spot where you're living through something where you can see design decisions happening in real time. Right. That's right. It's a nice joy in life. So what do you foresee for 2019? Both for you and for Axios and DataViz in general?
Future Goals for Axios
00:28:12
Speaker
For us, I think our goal for 2019 is we have such a great fast year. We can just produce and produce and produce. I think the challenge for us is slow down. What do bigger projects look like for us? Find a way to do them with much more intentionality.
00:28:32
Speaker
For Dataviz in general, I've given up guessing, to be honest. I think something that we're in the midst of right now is this sort of mobile revolution. Think back to what, 2012, 2013, where the New York Times was producing these fantastic interactive charts. They were all 900 and 900 pixels wide.
00:28:57
Speaker
It fit perfectly on your desktop and then they look like nothing on mobile, which is nobody was thinking about mobile because you had like the iPhone and who cares. Now I think I would say that more than 50% of anybody's page views come from a mobile device and how do you translate something
00:29:20
Speaker
really dense into a smaller screen where you have a shorter attention span. You have less real estate to display your information. I think it's hard. It's just really, really difficult. That's something that we struggle with every day.
00:29:35
Speaker
Like, whenever we make a really crazy chart and, you know, it's like, oh, great. Now make it read on 300, you know, 300 pixels wide. Right. It's just, this is why we have jobs. So do you, I think it was an Axios one, you guys did a beast worm plot that was vertical. Yeah. It was lined up vertically. It was timed and it was a Twitter data or something like that. And it was a beast worm. And it was time going from the far pass at the top and then you scroll down and you're closer and closer. Yeah. So have you ever done a piece like that where you're like, okay, so on the phone,
00:30:03
Speaker
It makes sense to go vertical, but maybe on a desktop. Oh yeah, all the time. Switching orientations is a really common trick. Where on desktop, height is probably your most important dimension because you don't want to be too tall, but you have the benefit of width.
00:30:19
Speaker
Whereas on phones like you can scroll as much as you want but like you gotta pack it all in like you know a tiny little narrow screen the fast but even then nobody's gonna scroll that far no that's right it's like it's hard it's just like you have to strike the balance between you know density and brevity right we're like.
00:30:39
Speaker
Are people, just because you're taking up space doesn't mean you're saying anything. Like I have a couple of decent practices, but then the thing is like if you design something for mobile, then does it just kind of look sparse on desktop, right? Yeah. And then you have the conundrum of like, well, why are you putting so much information on desktop and shortchanging your mobile readers? Do they not deserve the same information?
00:31:02
Speaker
But then some people will say, well, nobody wants to read that much on mobile. It's okay to take some things away. Do they do the same for the writing?
00:31:11
Speaker
No, I mean, I think the writing is the same. The writing is the same. Everywhere. Right. Right. But I think writing is, you know, text is very responsive. No, no, no. I'm just curious, like, if you think that people are only, you know, scrolling up with their thumbs so far, but I guess you just stop scrolling. You stop scrolling or like, you know, like the, again, like, you know, our text is like, you'll have two paragraphs before the read more. Like we do that automatically for you. Yeah.
00:31:38
Speaker
So it's already sort of built in right it's been we know we we sort of write and edit and package content with the acknowledgement that like you are busy you don't have time and you should inform yourself.
00:31:51
Speaker
Last question, I don't know if you know the answer to this though. Probably not. So I know the post does like A-B testing on their article. So they'll like mix up, they'll mix the headline and also the picture that does that. Do you guys do that sort of thing and we're kind of more to my interest, have you tried doing that with like Dataviz? Well, we've done limited analytics with Dataviz just to figure out
00:32:18
Speaker
I mean, we did one test where it's like, are people hovering on counties? Surprise, no. So we've done some limited tests like that, but we have not gotten around to doing AP testing. But that is fascinating to know. I mean, I'm personally interested in knowing if folks interact with really odd chart types. Right, exactly.
00:32:40
Speaker
you know, assume that like, you know, a baseline of folks are just doing a scroll right past it, right? Of the folks that do stay there, like, are they perplexed? Are they frustrated? And like, how can you gauge that? Right. So there's the question of why they're sitting on this complex, beastworm, whatever. So there's that question. But there's also the question of there's a beastworm chart versus a bar chart. Yeah. And like, are people more likely to hover over the bar chart?
00:33:08
Speaker
Well, you wouldn't even hover. Not hover, but like, stay. Get more readers.
00:33:13
Speaker
reading the bar chart than the B-swarm? And do they spend more time with one or the other? And then you get to this question of why are they spending more time on the one or the other? So I don't know. I mean, I haven't heard a lot of people trying to do this AV testing. I presume it's really hard to do. Well, you have to figure out how to measure it, right? I think often with analytics, it's like the thing you think you're measuring is probably not what you think you're measuring, right?
00:33:38
Speaker
So even with a chart type, maybe the point is for people not to have to spend a huge amount of time reading something. In that case, that is success and your beast form is not successful.
00:33:55
Speaker
I would not like to live in a world where everybody just decided we're only going to do bar charts and line charts. That would be sad. I think it is important to just push the field. I think it is good that weird charts exist just to show that they are possible.
00:34:15
Speaker
Even if you don't make it again or it sucked, it's good that you did it. Yeah, you tried it. You got it out of your system. And maybe somebody like 30 years from now will find this and be like, oh, I'm going to improve on this and they'll find success. I made this thing a while ago, it was like the emoji states of America or something where I could like turn off emoji faces.
00:34:40
Speaker
And the guy, Chernoff, the guy who created the chart type, he did it late 60s, late 70s or something. And nobody really took him seriously. Everybody was like, oh, this is not good. But I found it in 2018. My son loves it. Great. That's my target audience. Nine-year-olds. Yep, that's it. I think it's hard to see the value of experimenting and doing weird things.
00:35:07
Speaker
You know, because maybe there's no payoff, like maybe like nobody will read it, right? But like maybe it'll influence somebody like in a profound way, like much further on. And you'll never know about it. Yeah. But you will have contributed to the craft. To the world. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you, friend. Yeah. My pleasure.
00:35:36
Speaker
And thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the Policyviz podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. I've got some great episodes coming up in the next few weeks. Really excited to share with you some great discussions with folks from around the world doing some really neat work with data visualization and presentation skills.
00:35:52
Speaker
So again, if you would like to support the show, please do consider leaving a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast provider, or also consider becoming a Patreon supporter for just a couple bucks a month. You can help me out, uh, support the show and not force me to go find advertisers. So until next week, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.