Data Sketches

Data Sketches was a year-long collaboration between Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu, two of the most accomplished independent data visualization practitioners. Each month they chose a topic, independently created a visualization, then wrote up their process — data collection, design decisions, code challenges, and lessons learned.

What made Data Sketches groundbreaking was its radical transparency about process. Most dataviz is presented as finished product; Data Sketches showed the messy reality of creative work — failed approaches, changed directions, technical workarounds. This made it invaluable as an educational resource.

The project was published as a book by CRC Press in 2021. It demonstrated that data visualization is a creative practice with a process analogous to art and design, not just a technical skill. Both Bremer and Wu went on to become leading voices in the data visualization community.