When I was new to #dataviz, seeing only finalised projects by seasoned practitioners used to puzzle me: I always have thousands of questions on the process: how did you get there?
That’s why I document most of my projects, explaining the reasoning, design choices, technical hurdles etc.
This blog is to document and shed a light on how I created this data visualisation on the voting patterns at the Eurovision Song contest.
The idea
I am a massive fan of the Eurovison Song contest, and I already analyzed data on the topic of Eurovision voting last year. After decrypting the jury votes, I realised I was missing half of the picture and decided to plot and compare jury and public votes.
How about this year?
#1 Getting the data & analysis
#Wikipedia #GoogleSheets
- Retrieving data from Wikipedia pages is very easy, as I learnt when I completed the Data Journalism and Visualization with Free Tools: all you have to go is insert formulas in Google sheets to import the data that is displayed in tables via a formula such as =IMPORTHTML(“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurovision_Song_Contest_2009″;”table”;11)
- This excellent tutorial from the course might help
#Tableau #Excel
I used Excel for pretty much half of my formulas, but the overall render is done with the data tool Tableau
#2 Format & priorities
#mobilefirst #accessibility
My priority is to create with mobile usage in mind so I worked on the mobile version first and then I totally gave up on creating a desktop version with smaller fonts. You know what? If you can read it on mobile, that means it’s super accessible on desktop. 😀
Talking about accessibility, I tried, as best as I could, to stay colour blind friendly and have a good colour contrast with the help of my favourite tool Color Oracle
#3 Design
I used Figma for the background layout. I have already mentioned a couple of times the video resources that got me into Figma, should you be interested.
My main challenges
a) trying to be tasteful with colours, but also calling out the nature of Eurovision, which to me, is flashy, playful, and full of colours. I got inspired by colours I found on dark background vizzes on Tableau Public gallery.
b) took me ages to find a font to go with Verdana! I went for Sansita, because it has many weights and variations
#4 Technical & data challenges
#map_layers
My main chart looks like a classic scatterplot but actually, I used map layers!
Why? Because I wanted to change the level of transparency between the dots I wanted to highlight and the dots I wanted to recede, and that is not possible with a scatterplot in one layer, if I am not mistaken?
If you want to know more about map layers and how to use them, I listed some resources in this blogpost, when I used map layers for the first time.
That’s all for me, except if you have any questions!
The online dots 