I'm currently sitting in a hotel room in SeaTac Washington, as I've been at the Tableau Conference #Data14 this week. I'm sad that it's 8:15 AM on Thursday, and I'm leaving to head back to Ohio and missing a day of the conference, but I'm happy to have had the chance to be here.
Being at #Data14 was an awesome experience, especially during the opening keynote with Christian Chabot, CEO of Tableau, talking about Tableau being a blank canvas, and we are artists. This was so great to hear as I've been talking like this for the past 3 years that I've been using Tableau. I've been working hard to bring my Art to my corporate day job, and so far it's been working fairly well.
One of the things that I learned from #Data14 is that I need to be on Twitter, so I created a Twitter account (you can find me @TStoneOhio). I also learned that I should write a blog, so I created a blog and am now writing my first blog post :-)
Why am I doing all of this? Well, I'm not going to lie, I want one of my viz's to go virablog, l, lol. Seriously though, I have read many blogs that have helped me learn, and seen may viz's that have help and inspired me, so I want to return the favor.
With my first blog I want to share my latest viz. If you didn't know, everyone, well almost everyone in Ohio, loves The Ohio State University, and being born and raised in Ohio, I'm no different. I know there are many different options for NCAA football schedules, but I wanted to make something that I thought was cool. Mostly, I put this together because I recently seen a cool Viz on TableauPublic that really made me rethink how I was creating my viz's. It's actually quite funny, if you've seen me. I'm a big guy, with tattoo's and some thing I'm tough and unapproachable, but I'm really not that. I think I'm a pretty easy going guy. But I seen Jewel Loree's "Hello Etsy" viz (http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery/hello-etsy) which is a Hello Kitty theme. Can you imagine a big, tattooed guy digging a Hello Kitty theme? Well, I did, I love the layout, the color scheme, basically I love the entire idea of this viz.
This one viz changed my way of thinking, and inspired me to use the Artist in me to create something cool, an beautiful.
With my new Ohio State Football viz, I started creating the graphics. Found all the 2014 team helmets, made them into PNG's to be used for shapes. I used the official Ohio State University font, and tried to keep it simple. It was a bit of a challenge as the data wasn't the same from every school, so it took some time to get it formatted and shaped, but in the end, I think it was worth it.
What to expect in the future? Well I hope that I can find time to create some cool viz's on a weekly, maybe bi-weekly basis and share some how I did it, but I'm not making any promises as I do have a day job that keeps me busy, and a wife and 9 yr old son that gets 98% of my free time.
I'll leave you with this, another think I learned from #Data14, Steal like an Artist, this is what Anya A'Hearn said during her Zen Master presentation. And it's somethign that I've been doing for a couple years. Seeing other's viz's and downloanding them to reverse engineer them, and taking an idea like "Hello Esty" and being inspired by it.
Todd
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