Blog

A blog about all things visualisation, data science, and open source software. Some of these blog posts can also be found on R-bloggers, and many have been featured in the R Weekly highlights.

Creating data-driven art

If you’ve ever wondered what data-driven art is, or why people make it, then reading this blog post should help to answer those questions. It also includes an example of data-driven art, which can be created in Python or R, and talks through the process of getting started with your own art.

March 11, 2025

Designing monochrome data visualisations

In data visualisations, colours are often used to show values or categories of data. However, sometimes you might not be able to or want to use colour. This blog post discusses some tips for designing better visualisations when you’re restricted to a monochrome palette.

February 5, 2025

Working with colours in R

Whether you’re building data visualisations or generative art, at some point you will likely need to consider which colours to use in R. This blog post describes different ways to define colours, how to make good choices about colour palettes, and ways to generate your own colour schemes.

January 10, 2025

Introducing the {messy} package

The {messy} R package takes a clean dataset, and randomly adds mess to create data more similar to that which you’d find in the real world. This is an easy way for educators to create data sets that give students the opportunity to practice their data wrangling skills without having to change all of their examples.

December 3, 2024

Getting comfortable talking about tech

A blog post about some of the things that have helped me in getting comfortable talking about tech (although hopefully some of the advice is also useful for non-tech talks!).

November 5, 2024

Parameterized plots and reports with R and Quarto

After running the ‘Parameterized plots and reports with R and Quarto’ workshop as part of the R/Pharma 2024 Conference, there were a few questions that we didn’t get the chance to answer. This blog post aims to answer some of them.

October 28, 2024