I’m trying the 30 Day Chart Challenge — Here’s what I hope to get out of it
Or — how I plan to crank out more vizzes in a month that I usually publish publicly in a year.
What is 30 Day Chart Challenge?
The #30DayChartChallenge is a community driven event, with the goal to create a data visualization on a certain topic each day of April. It’s tool and social media platform agnostic — you can find out more about the challenge at the github here: https://github.com/30DayChartChallenge/Edition2024
Why am I doing it this year?
This data viz challenge has been on my radar for a couple of years — I originally planned on participating last year, but ended up competing at Tableau’s Iron Viz instead. Naturally, that took up all my vizzing energy!
I like that the challenge is tool agnostic and the topics are quite broad — by following the hashtags I love to see how people interpret the different prompts. It’s also a great way to get exposure to data viz outside of my current bubble. Finally, I enjoy the sense of community that comes from participating in data viz challenges.
What do I hope to get out of it?
I’m not aiming to create any award winning visualizations — instead I’m focusing on vizzing fairly quickly (I want to not spend more than an hour deciding on how to viz a topic) and becoming more comfortable with hitting ‘publish’ faster.
I’m hoping after 30 vizzes (or however many I actually complete) I’ll be better at looking at something I’ve made, deciding it’s “good enough” and hitting post without fussing over too many details. It’s easy to start a project, it’s harder (for me at least) to be comfortable putting the pencil down when I could theoretically keep making edits forever.
How am I going to approach it?
I’ve had this as a ‘maybe’ goal for a while — so I’ve kept a running list of interesting articles, charts, and data sets to use as inspiration for the challenge.
Now that the topics are out, I’m starting to map out ideas for what data set might fit well with a given topic.
Also, while I’m aiming to create 30 charts — but I’m not going to limit myself to working on only one chart a day. If some days go quicker than others, I may work ahead and then post on the appropriate day (which will come in handy when I’ll be mostly offline during Tableau Conference). And of course, who knows what next month will bring — if I can’t actually publish 30 charts in a month that’s fine, my baseline for success is attempting the challenge.
I’ll create my vizzes in Tableau Public — it’s the tool I know best and for this challenge it’s not really the time for me to start a new tool. I plan on cross posting both on Twitter and Bluesky if you’re interested in following along.
What are some resources to use?
I’d recommend checking out the github linked earlier as they have a solid resource list. But here are some more if you’re interested in attempting the challenge as well:
- Chart choosers: Link Hoarding: What Chart Should I use?
- Icons and Images: Link Hoarding: Icons and Images
- Color Palettes: Link Hoarding: Colors for your next project
And one resource that I just stumbled on this last week — it’s got design resources for pretty much anything: https://www.toools.design/
Note — I won’t be using any AI generated images during this challenge — I’m uninterested in using or promoting tools that scrape the work of actual artists without their consent or compensation.
Alrighty, that’s all for now. We’ll see in a month or so if I’ve made it through the 30 days!
