Nigel Holmes is a British/American graphic designer, author, and theorist, who focuses on information graphics and information design. Graduating from Royal College of Art in London in 1966, Holmes ran his own successful graphic design practice in England. From 1966 to 1977, he worked as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer for clients such as British Broadcasting Corporation, Ford Motor Company, and Island Records. His work appeared in New Scientist, Radio Times, The Observer, Daily Telegraph, and The Times. In 1977, art director Walter Bernard hired him to work in the map and chart department of Time magazine, where Holmes later became graphics director. After a sabbatical he started his own company, which has explained things to and for a wide variety of clients, including Apple, Fortune, Nike, The Smithsonian Institution, Sony, United Healthcare, US Airways, and Visa.
Episode Notes
Joyful Infographics: A Friendly, Human Approach to Data
AK Peters Visualization Series
Edward Tufte
Monty Python
Alberto Cairo (on Twitter)
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Transcript
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I am your host, Jon Schwabish. This episode marks the final episode of Season 9 of the show. Yes, nine years of doing this podcast. I know everyone has a podcast now, but when I started this show nine years ago, I didn’t really think I’d be doing it for this long, but I’m excited to have so many great guests join me on the show, and this week is no different. I’m so excited to be joined by my friend Nigel Holmes. Nigel has a new great book out Joyful Infographics. If you want a really actually joyful introduction and discussion of data visualization, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. There are so many little great treats, little Easter eggs in the book, which Nigel and I talk about in this conversation. I think you’re just going to really love this book. I think if you are someone who has been working with data and creating visualizations, this book will help you move to the next level to think about how to engage your audience, and how to bring that joy into your content. So Nigel, I talk about his writing process, we talk about different aspects of the book, we talk about how he designs the books, lots of different things for us to discuss. And so, I hope you’ll enjoy this season finale of the PolicyViz podcast with Nigel Holmes, and here is our conversation.
Jon Schwabish: Hey, Nigel, great to see you wearing blue as always.
Nigel Holmes: Hi Jon.
JS: Both got our blue on today, we’re good to go, we’re settled in.
NH: Yeah.
JS: Great to see you, it’s been since before the pandemic maybe, and we talked since then. As I recall, I think early on in the pandemic, you did one of the – I was doing that little video series.
NH: Yes.
JS: That urban, right. So that might have been the last time we sat down and chatted.
NH: Yes.
JS: It’s great to see you. New book out, Joyful Infographics, I’ve got it right here. Folks listening can’t see this, but I’ve got the – it’s the yellow blue cover with – I’ve got my yellow post it notes on the side here. There’s some great pieces in here, and I want to try to get to as much as we can, and I wanted to start just with joy, because it’s about joy. As far as I know, you’re pretty joyful guy, so I want to just get a sense from you of how you approach your work through this sense of joy, and how you bring that into your work and kind of maybe even what inspires you to bring that joyful approach into your work.
NH: Yeah. Well, the word joy actually was Alberto Cairo, he’s the editor, it was his title, was Joyful Infographics, which I loved. I mean, I just – I guess, I am optimistic and happy, and I love working. And I get excited when somebody calls and says, would you do this, and I will say yes before they’ve said what it is. Because some subjects are not so joyful, and that’s actually something that we maybe should talk about in a little bit. Because, I mean, I’m not trying to make people tell jokes with data or anything like that, it’s an approach more than anything, and I think it shows in the work. I think I can look at somebody’s work – somebody else’s work, and say, they enjoy doing this. I mean, so it’s enjoy, as well as joy, I just thought of that. Isn’t that clever? And I don’t know, I just – I want people to feel happy, I want them to be happy when they’re doing the work, and I do understand that it’s not always possible.
So I’m not trying to be dogmatic here, but you can still be joyful and happy even with difficult subjects, and the way to that is to try to be friendly to the reader or the user or somebody who’s looking on the web or somebody who is reading a page. I’m actually very much rooted in the static page, and in static websites by the way, but that’s just because that’s the way I grew up, and I haven’t really changed very much. But, I mean, magazines have been in my life, all my life from schools on and I always try to have a sense of humor, which comes I think from a lot of English influences, some of which are in the book, and some of them are just silly things like Edward Lear and Monty Python and things like that. And I understand that that’s not a particularly good example to use when you’re trying to tell people the truth about data, but you can have – everybody has silly thoughts. And I think the thing is to kind of train them into what part of this is silly enough that I can use it or is not so silly that I – or is too silly, so I should get rid of it. And anyway, I’m rambling.
JS: No, so how do you think about those more serious topics, I mean, we could take, I don’t know, relativist poverty rates as an example. Right? So how do you approach a story on poverty through a joyful lens, while giving it the seriousness that it deserves?
NH: Well, I think my approach is twofold. One is, if I can find a way to use humor, then I will; but if it’s completely inappropriate, then the second approach is I want to make it as understandable, as friendly as approachable as unlike homework as possible. So that things are clear, it’s clarity, it’s explanation, it’s something that people can look at and say, oh now I see it. And so, it’s a smile of recognition, more than of oh ha, ha, that’s funny.
JS: Right, it’s joy and understanding rather than joy of laughter, right.
NH: Yeah, right. But there’s nothing wrong, there’s nothing wrong with it.
JS: Right.
NH: And also some seemingly serious subjects, like, I don’t know, I’ve been fairly rude to politicians in the past when I was at Time, and the editors liked it, but the representatives of the politicians didn’t like it at all. And I did some pretty silly drawings of George Bush and of Reagan and of Carter actually, so you can tell how old I am here. I don’t know any other president. I mean, the thing is they did some things that should have been brought to the reader’s attention, and if it was a budget that wasn’t good, or it was something that they said that was wrong, or they were out of touch, I’m going to point that out. And, of course, that brought a hailstone down on me as well, or a hail of stones, or however you say it, from people who said no, if you’re information designer, you shouldn’t mess about like that. And my comeback was, hey, you don’t know my audience, my audience at that time, general purpose, reading a magazine, a weekly magazine that they were going to throw away, this was not going into the archive – well, it went into my archive, I mean, this is a comment, and I saw nothing wrong with making comments, and I still don’t. I think we should tell the truth. But I’m on the fence about both sides ism.
JS: Yeah. So I wonder then there is kind of an axis or a spectrum here of going from pure opinion to objective fact, maybe that’s not the right spectrum to think of, but I think a lot of people are making arguments with their data.
NH: Yeah.
JS: And maybe a lot of people get stuck in the trap of let’s try to be as objective as possible, even though we’re trying to make an argument.
NH: Yes.
JS: And do you think people sort of mix those two or confuse those pieces?
NH: Yes, absolutely, they do. And I can make that clear, and in a sense, I think it’s dishonest, if you don’t make it clear, I mean, if you just say – well, this is going to sound rude – but if you say to a reader, I trust you to understand what I’m saying in this data, and it’s really bad, none of that is spoken. You just give them it. A lot of people won’t get that, but others will, and they’ll say, wait a minute, that’s also bad because you haven’t pointed out the salient parts of the data, and I really think we should do that. I think there should be more kind of labels that say, wow, look at this bit, here’s a line that goes up, or, like this goes up, and it goes up, and then, suddenly goes down, well, wait a minute, what happened here, why don’t we just say something, and kind of mess with the purity of the data by helping people to understand it. And I think that’s a friendly thing to do, I think that’s a joyful thing to do.
JS: And when you talk about, and think about your audience, we can go back to Time, when you were at Time. Did you order folks there talk to readers, like, how did you figure out that audience, like, that they’re picking up the magazine, they read it kind of quickly, and then, they move on to the next magazine, like, so how did – because I think this is a problem a lot of people have, which is they want to think about their audience, but they don’t know exactly who their audience is, they don’t know how to get that feedback. So what was your approach and early on and even today?
NH: Well, early on was easy, they wrote letters, they wrote tons of letters, and they loved what I was doing. So that I was able to stand up in front of – I’m going to call him Mr. Tufte, because I don’t know whether he is a professor anymore, and say, hey, you get the wrong idea about me. I know who I’m talking to, and they love it. Now, he could easily have come back if he’d bothered to and say, but they shouldn’t love it, because it’s not pure. And I don’t know why it’s…
JS: Pure from his perspective.
NH: Yes.
JS: Right, from his perspective that is built on his opinion.
NH: Yeah. And, I mean, I think I got his books, I got all his books, they’re beautifully produced, they’re little works of art, and they have a lot of good stuff in it, and a lot of the things I actually agree with, and I was at a thing for the Cooper Hewitt about maps, they did an exhibition about maps. And his wife Dorothea was there, and she teaches drawing, and she was on the same panel as I was, and I got on really well with her, and I thought, oh at last, she’s going to go home and say, hey Eddie, this guy’s okay. And I never heard anything, no.
JS: I do like the idea of her calling him Eddie though. That brings me joy right there, just to have that.
NH: Yeah.
JS: So I want to talk about the production of your book in a moment, but I want to read a section here, a sentence that you wrote, because I think there are many amazing nuggets in this book. But this one is I thought about prepping for our conversation, I thought this one is useful for a lot of people. So early on in the book, you say, as long as designers don’t overload infographics with so much extraneous stuff that the meaning of the story is obscured, we shouldn’t be afraid to add a feeling of approachability and humanity, even humor where appropriate to our graphic toolboxes, which is something you’ve already talked about here.
NH: Yeah.
JS: I want to know, how would you recommend someone who’s an information designer think about that sweet spot between stuff and too much stuff?
NH: Yeah, Well, first, a mea culpa, I mean, academic people could have chosen much worse examples than the ones that you see all over the place that I did, where I, as I rose up through Time, I became the person who was in charge of saying whether or not it should be printed, and I gave myself too much liberty. And there are some really overloaded graphics that I did, that I’m ashamed of, which actually are in the book, which I’ve got to put a big cross through. Okay, so how would I advise somebody is two things to think about – what the subject is, and who the audience is.
Now, that sounds very – and we’ve talked about audience and it’s difficult to know who the audience is, but if you don’t know, I think you have to say, I’m making it for this audience, you’re doing it yourself. And have I made enough of a graphic point with, let’s say, the illustrations or whatever, photographs, or the visual stuff, that is not the data, have I made enough of a point of that without obscuring the data. And I always say that if I get the smile or the recognition from the image that people see, and don’t immediately, somebody doesn’t immediately say, oh that looks interesting, now, what’s the data, if they don’t say that, then it’s a failure, it’s too overloaded. It’s, oh God, I can’t get through this, the guy is just showing off, which I did.
I mean, I trained as an illustrator, I have no knowledge of statistics or anything like that, which I think is a good thing, because it keeps you ordinary, it keeps you like the readers. So think who is reading this, if it’s an academic paper you’re doing, you’re not going to mess about at all, and I wouldn’t. And I’ve done stuff like that.
JS: Yeah.
NH: If the subject is about death or AIDS, or, well, you see that ages me now, right away. But I mean, you know, or some sort of infirmity, I would never touch anything that was – that got in the way of the information. I’d make it straightforward, but I would come back and say, but I wouldn’t just put everything in, say, oh I haven’t gotten space for an illustration here, so I better put every data point in.
JS: Right.
NH: No, I would still make it clear, and if the line went up like this, gradually up, I might say, I’m taking this point, and this point, and making a straight line, because there’s not enough difference in the ups and downs of the line, I’m talking about a line graph here, but it could be bar chart or anything, there’s not enough difference for the audience that I’ve decided it is for, which is, in my case, the general reading public with who just wants to look at the information, get it, and move on. Then that’s it.
JS: Yeah.
NH: So what’s the subject, how far can you go with it, and then, who’s actually reading it, who’s going to look at this.
JS: So there’s the stuff that you’ve mentioned that sort of the, that has too much in it.
NH: Yes.
JS: And then, there’s the all the way the other side, which is take that line chart, it’s just the line, and it doesn’t even tell you what the graph is about, it just describes the data, right? It says worldwide deaths 1950 to 2022, and that’s it.
NH: Right.
JS: So in the middle somewhere, there is something that helps draw people into that graphic. And so, how do you think about, maybe it’s not death, maybe it’s not super serious topic, but it’s how do you sort of balance the – I want to add something here that engages people, I don’t want to make it look cartoony, I don’t want to make it look [inaudible 00:18:11] but I want to do something.
NH: Well, one thing is to say, is this actually worth the chart, maybe I can make my point with a well-crafted phrase here, and this was wonderful at Time that I could go back to the writers there, and I could do two things with them. I could say, you know what, the wretched old art department here, the art director has said he wants a chart on this page, I don’t think it’s worth it, which thrills the writer, of course, because they’ve got more space.
JS: More space, right.
NH: But what would you say about this particular set of numbers? And on the other hand, I hate it, when it’s all words about numbers, and you really wish there was a chart there. That’s an aside. But the other thing that I found with the writers was that I’d say to them, well, so what’s this actually like, what is happening here. Is this the tail wagging the dog or whatever? And if they said, yes, I’d say, well, can we have a tail wagging a dog here, or is that over the top. And then, there would be a discussion about it. But the main thing I want to say actually is it’s not always worth having a chart, and also, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with this very small chart sometimes. I mean, some things don’t have to be very big, especially the example that I gave of this point straight to this point, forget all the middle bit, 2000 here, 2022-23 here, straight line, that’s how much it went up.
JS: Yeah, and that’s all you need.
NH: And that’s all you need. Or maybe it is a big number that says it’s X percent growth, and it’s…
JS: Right. Yeah, last week, I was at the Tableau Conference…
NH: Yes, I know.
JS: And big numbers were a big theme in dashboarding. And so, I was just going to ask, how do you feel about just using those big numbers, and do you, or have you, I guess, played around with how those big numbers look. So 2.3% you could put that in Times do Roman black font, and it can just kind of sit there, or it could be more of what I would call like the Nigel Holmes approach, which is more of like an illustration with maybe a top head on the three or something like that. So when you design those, just those big numbers for those really small charts, do you sometimes try to make them a little bit more fun, a little bit more joyful?
NH: No, often I don’t. I will just say, for the reader and for the pacing of whatever it’s appearing in, that sometimes you can just have something that is really rather simple – clear, but simple. And then, the next page you get something that’s bigger and more developed, and, I mean, that comes from my magazine training in England before it came here, where the pacing of the pages was such that there weren’t rules exactly, but you didn’t blast every page with a big bleed of a thing, you paste it so that some pages were largely text or some pages had just a little thing in them, and that little thing could be a child.
JS: The concept of pacing is really interesting. Do you think the pacing in that hard copy magazine versus reading something online, that the pacing is inherently different?
NH: Yes, it is, and I’m not sure that I’ve mastered the pacing of websites. I work with my son on websites on my own, and he has very different opinions, not – well, no, he doesn’t have very different opinions, but he says, why don’t we try this, because you can do this, that’s a big – wait a minute, and has led to I think a lot of problems in information graphics, and data visualization, is that new programs – not that new now, which will produce you something at the touch of a button almost when you just load the data in, and you say, wow, oh okay, well, yeah, that looks good, but you haven’t done that. That is a bug for me is, I mean, it enables more people to do it. It’s the same with PowerPoint. And for goodness sake, what’s going to happen with AI, you know, I mean, we’re just – are we out of a job here, or…? I mean, I think it’s actually quite scary. I do.
JS: Yeah. We’re going to get off into a tangent not be able to come back.
NH: I know.
JS: Yeah, and the AI will shut us down. So the other thing I want to talk about was – and you’ve already, I think, folks listening to this can already get the sense, but the way you approach your work is very much from an empathetic perspective.
NH: Yes.
JS: So you approach your work, not just with empathy for the topic you’re working on, but also very clearly for the audience.
NH: Yeah.
JS: And one of the things that many folks talk about is being able to help people see themselves in the data. And so, if you take that empathetic approach, how do you think about that when you are creating graphics, and you’re saying, I want people to see themselves, because it’s going to be helpful, and they’re going to embrace it more, but you’re doing so in a way that’s respectful and that they’ll embrace – a very amorphous question here, but like, how do you approach that whole concept of empathy throughout the whole work process?
NH: Yeah. It’s something that I started to learn at Time was –and before that actually at the Radio Times in England, where I worked for 10 years before going to Time – the difficulty is putting people into graphics. And my natural default to begin with was white man doing something, you know, postal costs, white postman running up a thing, holding a letter. And the longer I was there, the more my friendly readers started to say, wait a minute, there are other people. And I would say, stupidly now, I realize at the time, well, this is just a graphic, this is just showing that a human is involved.
JS: Right.
NH: And, of course, that’s a wrong approach, I mean, it became difficult when I would use the auto [inaudible 00:25:31] approach of little figures lined up. And if they were black, people began to say, just as I was leaving Time, which is early 90s, are these black people. And I would say no, I mean…
JS: It’s representations of…
NH: It’s representations of people. And it’s actually very difficult, I mean, a kind of silly answer is never to use black people or white people, use blue people, because there are blue people. And of course, I like blue. So people would say, oh well, he’s using blue people, because he likes blue people. And then, is it a man or a woman, and I’ve been in discussions about the signs that you put on toilets and some men wear a thing that looks like a skirt, in Scotland, they do all the time. And some women wear pants, so is it right to show that, is that old fashioned, or what is that? I mean, I think about this a lot in terms of symbols. And so, in order to be able to see yourself in it, I don’t think I’ve actually found the right way to do it.
I mean, I go to the gym in the morning, I walk on the treadmill, and I watch CNN or something like that, and there are lots of ads, this is six o’clock in the morning – every ad has a black person, a Hispanic person, a woman and a man, whether, whatever it is about, whether it is about shopping, or jewelry, or cleaning, or gardening, and they are trying to bend over backwards to be inclusive, and I don’t think that is inclusive. In a funny way, every person in that gym watching those shows happens actually to be a white person. Now, is that an argument that they need to be educated? This is a huge question.
JS: Yeah, and very difficult, because how do you represent the entire experience and intersectionality of human beings.
NH: Right. So again, comes down to those two things, it comes down to the subject matter, and the audience, who you think your audience is. And I don’t know, I mean, I’m literally at a loss for words here, right?
JS: Yeah.
NH: I do not know how to…
JS: No, I agree with you, and we can talk about certain categories of race.
NH: Yes.
JS: And the categories of race that we tend to talk about tend to be very limited anyways.
NH: Yes.
JS: Gender, we tend to talk about man and woman, but we know that that’s limiting.
NH: Yes.
JS: So how do you, in an information visualization world, where we are trying to, in many ways, summarize experiences, and summarize data, how do we represent that diversity, which is – I mean, yeah – I don’t think there’s an answer, it’s something clearly that folks are thinking about, you’ve been thinking about. So if you were to go back now to Time, to those early graphics, would you – so I’m going to give you this scenario, because I’m going to limit the scenario, because otherwise we’ll never stop talking about this, cause I don’t…
NH: Yeah.
JS: So we’re going to give you the option to go back and review all of your graphics.
NH: Yes.
JS: You’re not going to be able to fundamentally change the graphic itself, but the representation of the people.
NH: Right.
JS: Would you move away from the icon of a person all together? You mentioned that you sort of early on were just using white man, would you sort of mix different genders and skin colors, what do you think your approach would be in that scenario?
NH: I would try to find a way around it so that I could show a person that was representative of the subject. So let’s think, I remember doing a thing about the army, the different divisions of the army, and I drew a person for each thing, and there were women in it, but I don’t think there are any black people. I think it’s a terrific question.
JS: Yeah, I don’t think there’s – I don’t know if there’s an answer to it.
NH: Yeah, I certainly wouldn’t abandon the idea of getting people interested by not using any imagery.
JS: Right, okay.
NH: That is one answer is just to say…
JS: Right, to just go to abstract shapes.
NH: Yeah. And I fear that some data visualization is just that, naturally. And there, it’s not that they’re avoiding using imagery, it’s just that they don’t think it’s appropriate or won’t help. But it is a bit of a cop out, I mean, I like pictures, people like pictures…
JS: People like pictures, right. And if the goal is to help people see themselves in the data, I don’t know if people see themselves as a triangle, or as a circle. Right?
NH: Right. Maybe it’s a circle, yeah.
JS: Yeah, maybe. Depends on what you had for lunch, yeah, could be a circle, yeah.
NH: Right, which [inaudible 00:31:38].
JS: Okay, so those are big topics, let’s pull back, and I love that we’re talking about it, but the other thing I wanted to talk about was the construction of the book, the physical construction of the book, because, like Jen Christiansen book, who was on a few weeks ago on the show, she designed her own book, this book, you designed, it feels – just the feel of the book is very different. And I’m going to give folks a little bit of a, I mean, it’s only an Easter egg if you don’t have the book, but there is, starting on page – I mean, this is one of my favorite parts – on page, I think it’s 99 – I’m flipping in here – on page 99, you have this discussion about Olympic icons.
NH: Right.
JS: At the very bottom of the page, there’s this little blue figure that looks like it’s running, and then, you say, you write in smaller text at the bottom in blue, you say, I think I’ll go for a run myself, mustn’t forget to exercise. And then, if you flip the pages quickly for the next 70 pages, there’s a little running Nigel Holmes, although I don’t think there are glasses on the figure.
NH: No.
JS: And then at the very end, where is it, at the very end, like, 80 pages later, the figure is lying on the ground, and you write, okay, that’s enough. So that’s a little Easter egg for folks who don’t have the book, those 80 pages, those little figurines, so…
NH: Yeah.
JS: Let’s start at the beginning, because a lot of books in this particular publisher, as I know, you could have just sent your Word document over and said, go ahead, lay it out, and let me take a look, and then, they would publish it. But you took a different path. So what was that decision like, and how did that all work out?
NH: Well, I’ve written quite a number of books, and some of them were designed by the publisher, the early ones, with collaboration, of course. And then, there was a couple that I did for Lonely Planet, and one for Tashan, which were completely designed by myself, and they were more like big magazines in a way, they were just one spread, and then another spread, and nothing linked on more than that. So this one, I thought, I’ll actually just write the book, and send it to them, they offered to design it. And so, I started to write that, and then, they came back and they said, well, we’ve got the text, we like it, but we need to know where the pictures are actually going to go that you’re talking about. And just stick them into the Word document, and, first of all, I had trouble actually importing things into Word and getting them, and I just thought, wait a minute, this is not going to work at all, because I’m now going to have to write a complete kind of how to design it book with this has got to be bigger than this one, this one links to this one, this is a series of three little ones, even though I’m sending them JPEGs that are all this size.
JS: Yeah.
NH: And so, Alberto actually said, the way I do it is to write and design all at the same time, so I was ahead of him because I’d written a lot of it, but I thought, okay, how’d you do that – use InDesign. And I had no idea how to use InDesign. I told the publisher who was expecting the book in about a month when I told him this, Elliot at CRC Press. And I said so I’m going to teach myself InDesign but I need longer to do this, and he didn’t seem to bat an eyelid. He just said, oh sure, take longer.
JS: I mean, you’re doing all the work that they were going to have to do.
NH: Yes, exactly. Yes, it crossed my mind that I should have asked for more money, at the beginning, as you know Jon, there is absolutely no money in [inaudible 00:35:44].
JS: No money.
NH: Unless you’re Alberto. I think Alberto actually does make money. But anyway, so I started with InDesign, and I realized I loved it, and it did all sorts of things – no, it didn’t, I made it do things. This is key, it’s key. I use none of the templates they gave me, not – I said, this is what I want it to do, and struggled a bit, but there are one or two things that I would change in the room, some little kind of style things that I should have ironed out a bit more. But by and large, that enabled me to make the book much more friendly, because I could put the pictures where I wanted them, they could be the size, I could refer to them. If they happened to be on the next page, I could say, turn the page or something like that. But I think, as you had mentioned to me earlier, they’re a textbook publisher, they wanted figures and numbers. And I hated that idea. And right at the beginning, I had said, you know, I know you’re a textbook publisher, but I’m not going to write you a textbook, so do you still want me to do it. And they said, oh yeah – I think which was just Alberto pushing them to say yes, it’s worth doing.
But I didn’t want that, and so, in the end, yeah, every page, and so, I was able to put that little running person in, which I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to before, and control. And actually, there’s a chapter in the middle with a blank page, and I – not a blank page, a blue page, and he’s not on the blue page, I see. But anyway, and I did the cover, and they were very good, they were terrific people to work with once the rules were set, yeah.
JS: But I would guess that a lot of people listening to this are surprised that you didn’t know InDesign.
NH: Oh I don’t know anything. Oh no, no, I am not going to confess everything, Jon here in front of your public. No, I am a computer illiterate. I am. I could not work without it, and I could not be an independent person without it. It’s my typesetter, it’s my career, it’s all of which I needed before.
JS: Right, but you do the illustrations outside, like, analog world?
NH: Well, no, I use Freehand, I use what I call Freehand for the illustrations. But no, I start analog absolutely, yes, drawing – drawing is very important, sketching and drawing, and then, scanning that, and then, bringing it into this old program called Freehand which anybody who is under, I don’t know how, what age, just over what age, no, under what age will not even have heard of. It was bought by Adobe in, I don’t know, 20 years ago, I think 20 years ago, and they killed it, because it’s a better program, and it’s much more intuitive. And I just stuck with it, and I have to use a completely different computer, because it won’t run on Mac, and anything that’s 10 or up or whatever. I think I’m 12 now. And so, I have a completely different setup over there, and I have a chair on wheels, and I go like this, and I work over here, and then, I come back with my little zip drive…
JS: You plug that in.
NH: I plug that in, and there it is for me to put into the book.
JS: Yeah.
NH: But, by the way, I find that very useful, the fact that you can do something really quickly isn’t necessarily good. I like being able to take my time over here, and then, physically, literally, physically put it on a different piece of medium of thumb drive, stick it into this computer, and that little kind of breathing space makes me see the thing new again. And if I was able just to very quickly, if I was using Illustrator, which I, of course, could do on this system, I think I would miss things. I think I would – I like the time, it makes…
JS: Yeah, to use the pause, right.
NH: Yeah.
JS: Wow. Well, it’s a great book. A lot of the DataViz books that come my way, I kind of scan or maybe don’t even read, and this one, I sat down and read cover to cover. There’s one in here about how aspirin works, there’s one in here about why – I remember this one from years ago, you presented the one on why you love cheese. I saw you present that one. So there’s just an amazing amount of detail in here, and I hope folks would get it, it’s a great book, really enjoyed it. So Nigel, thanks so much for coming on the show, I really appreciate it.
NH: Well, thank you, I enjoyed talking to you again.
JS: Thanks Nigel, appreciate it.
NH: Okay, all right. Bye.
And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week’s episode of the show and the entire season of the PolicyViz podcast. We’ve had a lot of great guests on the show, talked about a lot of fantastic work going on around the world in data, data visualization, presentation skills, AI, and just so much more. I’m going to take a couple months off from publishing episodes of the show, so I hope that will give you a chance to catch up. And I hope you’ll also take some time over the summer to rest and relax and recharge. So until next time, which will be September, until next time, this has been the PolicyViz podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
A number of people help bring you the PolicyViz podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs. Audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs. Design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Sotsky Remirez. And each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you’d like to help support the podcast, please share it and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. The PolicyViz podcast is ad free and supported by listeners. If you’d like to help support the show financially, please visit our PayPal page or our Patreon page at patreon.com/policyviz.
