Happy Birthday, PolicyViz!

Jan 07, 2025

I founded PolicyViz 10 years ago today! (Thank you, Commonwealth of Virginia, for making the process super easy!). At the time, I needed a place to park my ideas about data and data visualization. I had written an article on data visualization for the Journal of Economic Perspectives about a year before and I was getting more requests for teaching and consulting. Data visualization blogs were all the rage at the time: Storytelling with Data, Visualising Data, Flowing Data, and Junk Charts were, and still are, amazing resources to learn how to improve how you visualize and communicate data. The dataviz community on Twitter was really taking off with great conversations, debates, and yes, some fights.

I didn’t know where I was going to fit into this landscape. My approach to data communication was very stark and straightforward, overly persuaded by the dogmatic approaches of Stephen Few and Edward Tufte. But they (and others) also helped open my eyes to what was possible when it came to communicating (almost always dry) economic research, data, and analysis.

My wife actually came up with the name, PolicyViz. It was the right combination of my work—at the time as an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office—and my new enthusiasm for making better charts, graphs, and infographics. I built the PolicyViz site over the winter break and launched it January 10 years ago, when my kids were just little tots.

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Today, a lot has changed. Blogging has changed dramatically—I post things in this Substack newsletter before I put it on my site!—and I don’t visit those blogs nearly as often as I used to. Social media is, well, social media. The dataviz conference scene is a skeleton of what it once was—no more Eyeo; no more Tapestry; no more Visualized—mostly, but not all, thanks to the pandemic. The data visualization tools world has evolved and matured to a point where we can often make highly interactive or animated visualizations without having to learn to code.

Personally, I’ve tried to be a lot less dogmatic in my work—hell, I even use pie charts sometimes! I try to listen more, experiment more, and try different ways of communicating more.

I’m grateful for all the folks who have helped me along the way. Especially those right when I got started—Alberto Cairo, Ann Emery, Andy Kirk, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Robert Kosara, and Kim Rees—who have all become lifelong friends. And today there are even more; folks I can ring up at any time to chat or for help or for a laugh.

And, of course, I’m also thankful to my colleagues at CBO and the Urban Institute who have helped me grow and pushed me to create and build more and better graphs. And hundreds of clients, both small and large firms, private and public sector, and local nonprofits and community-based organizations (who have some of the hardest and most nuanced data communication challenges).

Whatever field you’re in, I hope you are able to take a moment and look around, and notice those folks who have helped you along your way. And if you can pass it on to others, even better.

With that, I’ll say Happy New Year and I wish you a great 2025!

Thanks,

Jon

DataViz

Alexander Ovechkin is closing in on Wayne Gretzky’s all-time career goal record. I had some fun comparing the two over their careers. You can check out the full version in Flourish.

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