Data Visualization Portfolio Reflection
Five portfolio visuals that track a semester's growth in polish, accessibility, and narrative storytelling.
What Changed This Semester
Early drafts exposed gaps in professional finish, data comprehension, and audience-friendly communication. Iterating on the same stories with sharper intent helped me transform recurring errors into deliberate design choices that would hold up in a client review.
Professional Polish
Eliminated artifacts, aligned tables, and introduced column spanners for executives who expect clarity at a glance.
Narrative Captions
Shifted from process notes to punchy insights that foreground the story each chart tells.
Accessible Design
Adopted colorblind-friendly palettes, readable typography, and context-aware axes to build trust.
Portfolio PDF
Browse the full six-page portfolio with embedded visuals, captions, and source notes.
Visualization Highlights
Visualization 1 - Executive-Ready Health Table
Global Health Metrics Comparison
A polished `gt` table compares life expectancy, infant mortality, and death rates for nine countries. Column spanners, aligned ranks, and color-coded performance finally match the expectations of an analyst briefing deck.
Key takeaway: Professional formatting is not a finishing touch-it is how data earns trust.
Visualization 2 - COVID-19 Response Storyline
Stacked line charts for New York, California, and Florida
Overlaying daily cases with the Oxford stringency index reveals how policy tightened as infections surged. The stacked view keeps timelines aligned while faceting ensures each state’s curve remains readable.
Key takeaway: Pairing outcomes with policy inputs helped audiences see causality, not just spikes.
Visualization 3 - Apollo Asteroid Origins
Scatter plot of orbital inclination versus semimajor axis
Color-coding eccentricity and annotating the Main Asteroid Belt transform a dense point cloud into a readable map of origin stories. Choosing a dark theme improved contrast for the plasma palette.
Key takeaway: Context callouts, not just legends, explain why certain clusters matter.
Visualization 4 - Western Flora Flows
Sankey diagram of plant families by state
The flow diagram surfaces how families like Asteraceae dominate Arizona and California, while grasses remain ubiquitous. Rewriting the caption around regional preferences kept the story audience-friendly.
Key takeaway: When distributions diverge, a flow chart can communicate imbalance better than bar charts.
Visualization 5 - Occupational Risk Facets
Facetted line charts across four hazardous industries
Breaking fatalities into top causes across time validates that “dangerous” is industry-specific-falls devastate construction, while violent acts dominate public safety roles.
Key takeaway: Faceting reduces cognitive overload when comparing trends that operate on different scales.
Process Notes & Tooling
Everything in the portfolio is reproducible in R. Packages such as ggplot2, patchwork,gt, and ggsankey handle rendering, while janitor and dplyr keep the data tidy. Automating color palettes with RColorBrewer and viridis prevents accessibility regressions during iteration.
Takeaway
Iterating on the same story with different charts made trade-offs obvious: tables foreground rankings, sankeys expose distribution, and facetted lines surface pacing. The code appendix in the PDF doubles as a knowledge base for future dashboards.