As a visual journalist at FiveThirtyEight, I am often asked what tools or software we use to create our graphics. Most people are surprised to learn that we sketch many of our graphics before we touch any tools or start coding. When we have no idea what a chart should look like, or we’re stuck on a graphic that just isn’t working, the other visual journalists and I will grab a pen and some graph paper and quickly sketch out some ideas. (Many of which are very bad — we don’t claim to be good at drawing.)
It’s a small part of our process, but we thought you might enjoy seeing how our ideas become the polished charts and interactive graphics you see on the site. This brings me to our new video series, “Quickdraw,” where members of the graphics team get together and sketch a data set. This week we’re taking a look at how we visualized 371 hip-hop songs that mentioned the 2016 presidential candidates for my recent article, “Hip-Hop Is Turning On Donald Trump.”
Video directed by Sam Roden and Nick Hartanto.