Visual Storytelling with D3

Master D3, Today’s Most Powerful Tool for Visualizing Data on the Web

Data-driven graphics are everywhere these days, from websites and mobile apps to interactive journalism and high-end presentations. Using D3, you can create graphics that are visually stunning and powerfully effective. Visual Storytelling with D3 is a hands-on, full-color tutorial that teaches you to design charts and data visualizations to tell your story quickly and intuitively, and that shows you how to wield the powerful D3 JavaScript library.

Drawing on his extensive experience as a professional graphic artist, writer, and programmer, Ritchie S. King walks you through a complete sample project—from conception through data selection and design. Step by step, you’ll build your skills, mastering increasingly sophisticated graphical forms and techniques. If you know a little HTML and CSS, you have all the technical background you’ll need to master D3.

This tutorial is for web designers creating graphics-driven sites, services, tools, or dashboards; online journalists who want to visualize their content; researchers seeking to communicate their results more intuitively; marketers aiming to deepen their connections with customers; and for any data visualization enthusiast.

Coverage includes

• Identifying a data-driven story and telling it visually
• Creating and manipulating beautiful graphical elements with SVG
• Shaping web pages with D3
• Structuring data so D3 can easily visualize it
• Using D3’s data joins to connect your data to the graphical elements on a web page
• Sizing and scaling charts, and adding axes to them
• Loading and filtering data from external standalone datasets
• Animating your charts with D3’s transitions
• Adding interactivity to visualizations, including a play button that cycles through different views of your data
• Finding D3 resources and getting involved in the thriving online D3 community

About the Website

All of this book’s examples are available at ritchiesking.com/book, along with video tutorials, updates, supporting material, and even more examples, as they become available.

Ritchie S. King is a reporter and visual journalist at FiveThirtyEight.com, focusing on data visualization and interactive features. He previously held a similar role at Quartz. In a previous life, he was a chemical engineer at a start-up trying to turn wood chips and switchgrass into fuel. Though he left engineering to become a journalist, he’s still into math and likes to muck with data. His written stories and graphics have appeared in the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Science, and IEEE Spectrum.