My on-going list of resources that I use on a daily or pretty regular basis for data design and UI web design at my day job or freelance projects.
Coding Tools & JS Libraries
- JSFiddle – In browser JS playground; great for sharing snippets with others
- CodePen – in browser HTML, CSS, JS playground; excellent for sharing, curating, or testing in a safe place; great place to explore other code
- HighCharts – easy to use JS library for charts and graphs
- D3.js – robust data vis JS library for almost anything you can imagine
- Vega – declarative style JS library for datavis using Canvas; built by the same guys as D3
Online DataVis Tools
- Plot.ly – online datavis generation tool; pretty robust; great for sharing data or design; excellent for roughing out design ideas
- Google Fusion Tables – sort of like Google Sheets +. Great for roughing out design or looking at data to draw conclusions; great for creating safe places for clients to see data or vis ideas.
- Import.io – almost magical web data scraper.
Project & Client Management
- Freedcamp – excellent free project management tool; great alternative to Basecamp
- Timely – time management and time keeping online app; color code projects, sync with Google or Exchange calendar, even generates monthly reports. Free with user and project limitations.
- Dropbox – I don’t think this needs a description
People
This list could be miles and miles and miles long. Here’s just some of the absolutely amazing people doing incredible work out there. All of these people (mostly) are also excellent dudes to follow on Twitter.
- Andy Kirk | Visualizing Data
- Stephanie Evergreen | Evergreen Data
- HelpMeViz – great community of datavis design feedback and analysis
- Jon Schwabish | Policy Viz
- Nathan Yau | Flowing Data
- Alberto Cairo | The Functional Art
- Edward Tufte | The man, the myth, the legend
- David McCandless | Information is Beautiful
- Scott Murray | Aligned Left
Papers, Articles & Other Resources
- University of Washington Interactive Data Lab
- Stephen Few on Color [PDF]
- Jon Schwabish on Visualizing Economic Data
- Google’s Material Design Guidelines
- Why is sketching such an important aspect of design? | Forty
- The Messy Art of UX Sketching | Smashing Magazine
- Sketching Interfaces: Toward More Human Interface Design [PDF] – Very old (2001) article, mainly about an application called SILK, but the concepts it discusses are still relevant
Do you have data design tools, applications or resources you consistently turn to? Let me know!