This site is written and maintained by me, Benjamin Lear. I am a professor of chemistry at The Pennsylvania State University. I am not a trained designer and I came to the field of design reluctantly. This website is my attempt to structure what I have learned in a way that might be accessible to other news to thinking about the design of data visualizations.

My design journey began with persistent, but gentle, questioning by a graduate student, regarding why we plotted data the way we did. At the time, I didn’t understand why she was asking these questions, why I should care about design details, and how I could even start to answer them, if I did care. Luckily, she had ideas of how to think about design and, over the years she was in my group she provided an effective gateway for my design thinking.

After her graduation, I decided to learn a bit more on my own—a journal that eventually led to the creation of a course at Penn State focused on the design of data visualization (SC103N: When Data Meets Design). While designing this course, I decided there was no great resource to use when teaching design to practicing scientists and engineers. This website is an attempt to solve this problem. It is my hope that you can learn a bit about how to design effective data visualizations from it!