VizThink 2008
The idea to start to a blog was always on our mind. There was a lot going on for us and a lot of news to share but when faced with a limited amount of time and the decision of writing news or developing reports, the choice was pretty easy.
First, there was VizThink 2008, held in San Francisco in February. The inaugural conference brought together people to discover, create and share ideas on how visualization could help them in their endevours. They came from every where you could imagine, public, private and not-for-profit; from Fortune 50 to one person start-ups. Everyone was there to learn how to convey information more effectively through an image and within an hour of attending a few of the talks and workshops, you could almost see the light bulbs turning on over people’s heads. In fact, within the first 10 minutes when Dave Gray, of Xplane, led entire conference through a five minute exercise on how to draw what you do, it was like putting two hundred fireflies into a jar and shaking it up. If you have any interest in the emerging community of visual thinkers, VizThink is definitely worth a visit. Anyway, on with the show….
Over the next month, we’ll mention some specific nuggets of wisdom that popped up during the two days; for now, here’s a personal/professional highlight: meeting renowned visual communications guru Karl Gude. Karl managed information graphics for Newsweek magazine for over a decade, and at the Associated Press prior to that, he’s currently putting together an Information Graphics program at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism. Karl was generous enough to give our reports a twice over and had some good suggestions right off the bat, as you’d expect from someone with his level of experience. In email exchanges after the conference we were quite humbled by some of his comments (quoted with permission):
Your well designed and useful report provides a clear visual snapshot
of a dealerships complete financial picture on a single page, from a
broad-brush performance review of overall earnings and vehicle
category sales to a detailed horse race of each individual sales
associate’s fiscal contribution. The amount of data that has been
pulled from the record books and packaged here so nicely is really
quite amazing. Your graphics rocks.
Now there’s a Dealer Diagnostics’ milestone that will become etched into office lore.
Beyond the feedback on the reports, which included thoughts from people in as diverse industry’s as finance (CIBC Global Markets), print (Wired) and government (the CIA), a lot of ideas fell out of the event. Here’s what came of Dave Gray’s 10 minute drawing exercise.
It also proved to be a hit with everyone we showed it to; so much so, it became the back of our business card. Any idea what we do?
