Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
This is especially invaluable if you are collaborating with others and the
creative process is a shared experience. Doing this could save you a lot of
time clarifying and formalizing your collective thoughts. It will also be a
safeguard against the risk of forgetting those great initial sparks of creativity
that came to mind when the project was first triggered. It will also enable
you to quickly refine and change direction, if necessary, without having
committed time to any technical development.
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Note taking
: As you develop your expertise in data visualization, one of
the best methods to improve your creative judgment is to document your
decision-making process. Keep a log of all the choices you've made, the
reasons why you've decided to do one thing or reject something else, the
ideas you've had along the way. You should also record details of any
procedures you have established for tasks such as cleaning or transforming
data or the cropping treatment applied to a set of images—you may need to
repeat these and follow the same exact stages later. Finally, it is vital to make
a note of all your data sources and references (including things that have
influenced/inspired you). All this material will be particularly beneficial
if you have the opportunity to publish a narrative of your design process,
which can be extremely educational as much to yourself as it is to others.
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Time management
: As with any design project, the planning and allocation
of your time and available resource is a vital discipline. Utilize time wisely
otherwise you can quite easily get sucked into spending too long on the
minutiae of one stage (especially on the more attractive creative tasks). Don't
be surprised to find that a great deal of your time is spent doing relatively
mundane tasks such as data cleaning or preparation. That is to be expected.
Also, developing an awareness of your typical design activity duration is
very important, especially if you are a freelance designer looking to develop
a more sophisticated approach to estimating and pricing for clients.
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Reinventing the wheel
: As the field continues to mature and innovative new
techniques are developed, there is a constantly growing reference library of
potential solutions. As you will see soon, we shouldn't always need to feel
like we have to constantly invent something new. There are plenty of creative
options already available to be influenced or inspired by, providing us with
idea templates to develop and tweak for our needs. Of course, you should
always attribute influence and reference designers' work when it has been
utilized as a significant and apparent source of help.
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