Insights
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This Designer Made a Graph About Emoji: What Happened Next Was…
For one week in August I charted the way our team uses emoji in Slack. Going in to the project, I had a handful of notions about what I might find: I figured we probably 👋 a few …
Why we don’t sell hours
Being a small but profitable company, Planetary has the luxury of experimenting with some of the basics of what we sell and how we sell it. Simply put, we sell our team’s ability t…
Design Better Data Tables
Poor tables. Where did they go wrong? After being the bread and butter of the web for most of its early history, tables were cast aside by many designers for newer, trendier layou…
Datum Ipsum: Designing real-time visualizations with realistic placeholder data
tl;dr — I’ve created a tool called Datum Ipsum to enable designers to use realistic data when mocking up data visualizations. Also, this is a written version of a talk I gave at Da…
Those New-Hire Feels
It’s no secret that we’re a small team here at Planetary; this means that any new addition to the team brings a huge upgrade in the expertise, experience, interests, opinions, favo…
Why we don't take Siri seriously
The rise of the robot assistant is happening. Last year, Amazon’s Echo accounted for a quarter of all speaker sales. Siri, Cortana, M, Magic, Alexa, and Slackbots have all begun v…
Tiny Data Visualizations
Have you seen this comprehensive list of Donald Trump’s insults? Or maybe this detailed rundown of the 2016 Primaries? Data is a big deal in the newsroom right now, and in 2016, we…
Mind the Gap
Designing graphs with missing data Data-driven interfaces are on the rise. Financial District CEOs want to see a birds-eye view of their bottom line as much as Silicon Valley Co-f…
Goldilocks your graphs
Finding the “just-right” in data visualization Data visualization is everywhere. From analytics platforms to infographics, across newsrooms and social media channels, there are va…
The human organization
One day last August my Dad called to tell me that my Mom had cancer and it was serious. When I got off the phone I was in shock. I mumbled to my coworkers that it was bad news and…