Data Visualization Society: Data Driven Logo by Amy Cesal

The Data Visualization Society fosters a community where every member benefits from resources that support growth, refinement, and expansion of data visualization knowledge regardless of expertise level. We felt that the organization needed a special data-driven logo to represent the diversity and passion of the membership.

We did this by collecting individual survey responses from every member of the society and recording their self-reported expertise into different data visualization related skills across three broad areas. While there’s no absolute metric to measure these qualities, we developed a way to let people rank themselves across 9 categories pertaining to their skills in Data (collection, data cleaning, analysis) Visualization (design, building, storytelling) and Society (project management, community, leadership). To create the main logo for the society, we averaged the responses of entire membership, which highlighted the overall breadth of skills within the membership. Since data visualization touches on many skill sets, and people come to it from different backgrounds, we also wanted to to visualize each member’s unique visualization skills. Each member received a personalized badge—variations on the main logo theme—that represented their own unique responses to the survey questions. Individual members’ badges act like data viz fingerprints, showing which of the skills and disciplines in a data visualizer’s portfolio they most identify with.

When looking at collections of individual member badges, trends start to become visible: large teal triangles convey an emphasis on data, a large yellow spike to the upper right is someone with a strong design background, and smaller forms indicate someone might be new to the field and just starting out.

The Data Visualization Society logo and badges use individual membership survey data to convey the diversity and breadth of the society’s membership, while still emphasizing the each individual members’ ownership and belonging in this diverse field, as they literally are reflected in the main society logo.

The entrant has supplied multiple files for this project:
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]