Nancy Organ

My book

Data visualization is the art and science of making information visible. On paper and in our imaginations, it’s a language of shapes and colors that hold our best ideas and most important questions. As we find ourselves swimming in data of all kinds, visualization can help us to understand, express, and explore the richness of the world around us. So I wrote a book about it!

Data Visualization for People of All Ages invites everyone to the table to share the joy of one of today’s most necessary skills. Packed with practical examples and exercises to help you connect the dots, this book will teach you how to create and understand data visualizations on your own—all without writing a single line of code or getting tangled up in software. Perfect for home or classroom use, this friendly companion gives people of all ages everything they need to start visualizing with confidence.

Available now on...

Routledge
Amazon
Barnes & Noble

About Nancy

I'm a data visualization designer and educator with experience in research, education, and tech. Currently, I work at the exciting healthcare tech startup, Trilliant Health. In past lives I was a Data Visualization Developer at Microsoft, an Information Visualization instructor to Masters' and undergraduate students at the University of Washington, and a medical researcher at UW and Vanderbilt University. My formal training is in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley.

My design methodology prioritizes preserving your voice in engaging, illuminating visualizations. Your work can and should have the presence it deserves. As of Summer 2023 my studio hours are currently on hold, but I'm always happy to chat about your project and talk about future collaborations.

The Sandbox

This is a space I created to corral my experiments and concepts that haven't found a home elsewhere. Not everything you'll find in these little vingnettes makes perfect sense, is totally done, or follows traditional design and visualization canon— and that's exactly the point. If we don't try things out, we'll never know what works!

Selected Writings

Sorry, I can't read your visualization
An Incomplete Guide to Accessible Data Visualization
Practical tips for doing even a little bit better.
Break your bar chart habbit
Deconstructing visualization design using the Grammar of Graphics
The Color Theory of Nail Polish Names
A rose by any other name is Grenadine Cascade?
Technical Writing for Data Scientists
A four-part formula for radically adequate technical writing
Data Visualization “Therapy”
Because sometimes you just need to talk it out

More articles can be found on my Medium page here.

Word Llama

Studying languages is a longtime hobby of mine, so I've developed some pretty strong opinions on the best ways (for me) to learn. For example, I like to have a full overview of the language's grammar from the start so that I can study it as a complete system. I also like dabbling in interesting and specific vocabulary; it's more fun than "house" and "ball" and helps to build pattern recognition and prediction skills for the times that I need to guess a meaning.

Word Llama materializes these preferences, and I'm using it personally for a few langauges that I'm studying for fun. It has multiple drill types to ease you through from recognition to full recall, there's a spaced repetition feature, list sharing, customizable lists, a big bank of pre-loaded vocabulary, verb conjugation drills, and even a fun feature for assembling sentences.

You can try it out here!