Indian Batsmen vs Left-Arm Pace

James Strachan | Data Visualisation | #MakeoverMonday | 2020 | Week 35

Background
This was my first ever #MakeoverMonday data visualisation. However, I've been a Tableau user for several years, and am Tableau Desktop Professional Certified. Nevertheless, I was still nervous about submitting, as there are so many talented analysts in the Tableau community, that I thought my work simply wouldn't be good enough (impostor syndrome is something that I've always wrestled with).

The ESPN Original
I was grateful to see that the data-set for this week's submission was very simple  and the style of the original data viz by ESPN was an infographic, so the emphasis was simply on cleaning up and simplifying the viz. Broadly, I thought the colours and proportions weren't too bad, but a simple bar chart should have been used instead of the 're-sizing' player photos, which is more difficult to read:

My #Vizabit Makeover
I tried to keep some of the basic design elements I considered to be strong (the centred title, large fonts, dark background, limited colour palette). I chose a bar chart, but knowing there'd be lots of these, I spent a bit of time searching for images of the 5 batsmen, to help my submission standout a little and bring the data to life. Lastly, I created a little logo for my #vizabit twitter handle (ambitiously hinting my hope to viz/blog a lot more in future):

Here's a link to the viz on Tableau Public. All in all I found the experience an enjoyable and gentle (if somewhat time consuming) intro to the world of public data visualisation. If anyone finds this blog, any feedback is always welcome. Let's see if I manage to make a habit of this (and become more efficient)...

Epilogue

So I saw so many wonderful variants of such a simple data set on Twitter that I couldn't resist coming back to mine to make some minor enhancements. The main inspiration came from @agatavizz, who had used thinner, rounded bar charts for a cleaner look, and an animated sort control, all of which I liked. I also though the diverging bar chart was a better choice, as even though dismissal numbers are low in absolute terms, they are still important, so using a diverging bar chart allowed me to give them broadly equal screen real-estate with the batting averages. I also made the player images smaller, and grey in order to let the data stand out more. Very happy with the final product now!

Explore the viz yourself...