Harry Potter Viz? Yes Plz.

I wanted to document a fun and quick project collaboration that came about on a whim (actually, over some great snacks at RJ's place in San Francisco...) 

If you haven't come across Shirley Wu's work in Data Sketches, on Polygraph, or on her website you must check it out! But long story short, RJ and I got a sneak preview of Shirley's February data sketches project and were giving her some ideas. 

Nerding out big time today with @infowetrust and @sxywu - talking about January @datasketches and so many other things 🤓📊📈 #madewithpaper pic.twitter.com/x8OM6ZkjZa

— catherine madden (@catmule) February 3, 2017

After learning about what data she was using (Harry Potter fan fiction) and thinking about what types of visualizations she was going to create, I insisted that she let me create custom icons for each of the characters.

We wanted to do it very quickly, so I figured out a quick process for finding images online and then tracing the characters in Adobe Draw (then exporting to Illustrator) for easy export to SVG. 

Behind the curtain- I used Adobe Draw to trace the characters from images online

Here is the final set of 20 characters in the viz, created in just about 2 hours: 

And here is the awesome final product! 

So, definitely go check out the whole piece on Shirley's website, but you should also read about the process on Data Sketches. It's fascinating to see how she and Nadieh think, experiment, and produce their work.