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Pixel Perfect: A look back at my first time creating a data viz for print

Writer's picture: Zane WolfZane Wolf

Creating a data viz for print was the steepest and most foreign learning curve during my time as an intern at Scientific American. I ended up working on two spreads, one only a month into the internship and the second at the very end as one of the last things I worked on. Both experiences were unique and the second was so much easier in many aspects due to how rough the first ended up being. In hindsight, of course, I wouldn't have expected it or wanted it to go any other way.


I had only been in the internship for about a month, working on graphics for one, maybe two, digital news article when the opportunity to produce graphics for a print article by Sarah Scoles came up. Honestly, I was a little shell-shocked when Jen offered me the opportunity. "Want to dig into it and see if there's enough to create a visualization?" she wrote in an email (paraphrased).


I thought it'd be a few more months at the very least before I'd have the opportunity to work on a graphic for the print magazine. I knew the previous intern made theirs in their last month of their internship (which was one of the last three-month rounds before SciAm extended the internship to six months). However, it didn't even occur to me to say no or that I wouldn't be able to make something.


Looking back, that is the most surprising thing to me, I think—the fact that I, having never worked on a visualization project of this type or scale before, never for a second doubted that I could do it. I don't know if it was unfounded arrogance, naïveté, or simply riding the new-found wave of self-confidence that getting the internship to begin with and being involved with DVS and Outlier 2024 had given me. (Honestly, my money is on a combo of two and three.)


And...I did it! You can check out the process in the portfolio write-up.


But it was not an easy process. In fact, it was almost deceptively smooth right up until the end. There are four major deadlines when creating a print graphic:


  1. A concept sketch: you have a rough idea of the data and create sketches of the visualizations, but the sketches aren't necessarily accurate to what the data says. You're just working through the visualization options.

  2. A tight sketch: you produce a visualization that is more or less based on the actual data

  3. A final draft: this should more or less be the final draft, and from this Jen works her editorial magic to improve the layout, tweak encodings or colors, place annotations, etc.

  4. Bonus: There is as also the deadline of when the spreads are sent to print. If you're working as a freelancer for SciAm, you don't really need to know or worry about this deadline since it's mostly internal use. But I was internal.



The process of creating a concept sketch, a tight sketch, and a final draft all went really well. I think I lulled myself into a false sense of security. After you submit the final sketch and documentation, the visualization goes through fact-check to make sure things are as accurate as possible. It did seem odd to me that fact-checking happened so late in the process, but there's not really another time that makes sense practically for it to happen.


But between submitting the final draft and the print deadline is where things started to go off the rails.


There was some ambiguity in the budget data, particularly around how I had chosen to adjust the budgets for inflation, that required quite a bit of back-and-forth to resolve. I ended up needing to tweak the numbers and the visualization only slightly, but I experienced a lot of stress and anxiety during this process around having basically generated my own data and the possibility of having absolutely bungled it. I didn't, thank goodness.


I also lost some details in my first large-scale adobe illustrator project that were only found with like a minute to spare before the magazine went to print (the bubble details of certain missions weren't correct—bonus points if you can spot the errors in the drafts in the portfolio write-up).


At the final sketch point in the print magazine making process, you the creator have to hand off what you've made to your editor. From there it goes through an entire factory of behind-the-scenes processes that, at the time, hadn't yet fully been explained to me. (It was a hectic early fall and I don't blame Jen at all for not filling me in on the details—they weren't important.)


But knowing there were mistakes in the visualization and not being able to fix them myself because I no longer had control of the files was an entirely new situation to me. Even with digital news graphics, I maintained full control of the graphics through to publication. So this new lack of control.....I didn't like that. I remember being so frustrated with my seemingly unending series of stupid beginner mistakes and inability to fix them myself (I told Jen or others caught them and then she fixed them) that I found myself screaming into a pillow at one point.


The lack of control and the stress about getting it absolutely, 100% perfect for print would have been the same regardless of how hands-on Jen could have been during the process. What would have made a difference was slowing down and paying attention to the details during the process so that I didn't misplace any encoded information amongst the illustrator layers.


Jen never once expressed anything other than patience and understanding as we resolved the errors. She reassured me it was all fixable, and fixed it, and provided good feedback afterwards about things I did really well (such as problem-solving the horizontal vs vertical layout and coming up the alternative designs when we realized certain sketches weren't working, and my good documentation of the process made fact-checking rather clear-cut despite the lengthy discussions on the budget ambiguity) and things to keep in mind for next time. We also discussed more about the editing process once I hand off the files to her for production so it'd be less of a black box next time.


I talked about my experience with both friends and Jen afterwards. One friend told me that their first experience making something for print was so stressful that they cried. Misery loves company and hearing that definitely made me feel better about my own experience, knowing it's difficult for everyone. Jen and I discussed more about the process and if/how I could have been more supported. Like I said, I think the mistakes I made and the stress I felt were a natural part of the learning curve of doing something completely new.


And slowing down, paying attention to the details, is something I feel I greatly improved upon throughout my internship, due exactly to this experience.


In the end, this was a learning experience through and through. I learned about the print process, I learned about making a page-and-a-half data visualization spread and all that that entails, I learned about how to modify the spread for digital, and I learned a bit about myself and what causes me to feel frustrated in a project.


I think it went rather well. :)



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