For Immediate Release:

Saturday, January 5, 2019

Hi, dear readers! I’m Sara Vaca (independent consultant and Data Visualization lover, Saturday eventual contributor to this blog) and I thought of starting the year by sharing tips about something people sometimes ask me.
Leason Learned: Becoming slightly obsessed with something helps.
I discovered Dataviz in 2011 while I started on Twitter, during a maternity long leave. I remember seeing the first hashtagged infographics there (of course I had seen visuals before but no one had called them that) and remember thinking: “I need to learn this (visual) language”. And that day, my mini-obsession began.
Cool Tips: So what did I do? Here are my tips:
1) I started reading about Dataviz in blogs of the experts that generously were writing about it. My first favorite was Alberto Cairo, but there were also of course the late Hans Rosling, controversial David McCandless whose informationisbeautiful’s style always inspired me, Andy Kirk with his huge repository visualisingdata, then I discovered Ann Emery and Stephanie Evergreen who were already combining dataviz with evaluation, and I got even more excited.
2) Also I started watching TED talks and conferences.
3) Then I started trying to think visually, like an unconscious riddle to my mind: which things that we usually represent with words and paragraphs could be presented differently -like visually?
4)And I started playing, literally.
A friend told me that you have to dedicate time to things you love, but also, to things that disturb you. So first thing I started playing with was CVs (as it disturbed me how dull they usually look). I did mine and many friends’, and I started offering people to collaborate with them, trying to introduce visual elements in their reports or books (with little success in the beginning, either in response or in final results, but always fun).
In 2012 I started my M.A. in Evaluation and I decided to try to do all my homework visually (again a playful way of practicing – some examples: What is evaluation, History of Evaluation, Evolution of paradigms, amongst many others).
Note: By that time, most of the visuals I was creating were hideous and/or ineffective.
5) In 2013 I started conducting evaluations myself, so of course, I began creating visual elements for my reports.
6) By the same time, I started to blog to gently force myself to think, to practice, to produce more visuals. At the beginning I used to be very exigent with the level of the visual posted, but then I realized that often is not only what you share but also what it triggers into other people’s thoughts. So any idea is almost welcome now – and I have sooooo many!
7) And I’ve never taken any training course, but of course there are many in-person and online.
Lastly, it’s true that in 2012 I started learning basic Illustrator on my own, but trust me: your brain, paper and Powerpoint is honestly all you need to start.
All the best on your visual journey