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Hi! I’m Caia Sullivan, a senior about to graduate from SUNY New Paltz. Outside of being a designer, I love to read, workout with my little sister, and travel as much as I can. I’m also a big foodie and love trying new things, but I hate cheese, which has made yellow one of the colors that I use the least. Although I am not as much of a multimedia artist, I took a Basic Metal class in college, and one of my goals is to learn more about creating things out of metal and incorporating that into my design work.

This is my first data visualization class, and I’ve learned so much from Professor Josh Korenblat. Previously, I had only used the data tools on Adobe Illustrator, but Josh has taught me so many ways to push the boundaries of data visualization. Although I am still learning Tableau, it’s been an incredibly helpful resource in sorting and visualizing data. However, the biggest skill I’ve gained from this class is how to tell a data story. Learning how to take a big spreadsheet and organize it into a concise story that anyone can understand has been my biggest achievement from this class.

My portfolio is meant to showcase the progress that I’ve made over the course of each project. I am a very ambitious designer, even when I didn’t know the software yet. Data Visualization has really encouraged me to think outside the box in terms of how I can show my story. Over the past semester, I have storyboarded a tablet game (something that I will be making a summer project, because I was very proud of it), made a concept for a fold-up map of deaf community research in Nigeria, and laser cut two acrylic pieces to show a data story for Thalassophobia—the fear of the ocean. The project that I refined is a mini zine on blockbuster movies from the very beginning of the semester. The data set was massive, so I chose to focus on the differences between audience and critic ratings. The data cleanup itself was very interesting, but visually, it could’ve been executed better. I chose to reformat it as an Apple News story/visual on an Apple Watch, simply because I wanted to see what I could do on a smaller screen. I know what Apple News looks like on a phone, but what would it look like to scroll through an article on a 46 mm screen?

My final screens

growth

Prior to this class, I avoided Google Sheets and Excel like the plague. With Josh’s help, I was able to learn the basics of Google Sheets: how to convert a spreadsheet into a table, how to filter data, and how to create pivot tables. After getting a handle on that, I moved onto Tableau, which is significantly more difficult to learn than Google Sheets. For one of my first projects, a Makeover Monday data story on men’s versus women’s preference for pizza toppings in the UK, these were my first two Tableau visuals:

They are fine, but the top one in particular was just so simple. I wanted to make a more complex visualization, not just a square chart. Josh was my biggest resource while learning Tableau, and he helped me create a more complex visualization than I knew how to make at the time Although the bar chart isn’t my favorite, the barbell chart was my best visualization for this project. I was struggling to make a horizontal chart that wasn’t a bar chart and would be more legible than one. Josh suggested a barbell chart, and taught me how to place and connect the dots.

However, Tableau was still hard for me to understand at this point in the semester. I wanted to make something unique and interactive, and Josh mentioned that I could also use Illustrator or Figma. That gave me the idea to storyboard a tablet game, inspired by Papa’s Pizzeria, where users learn the data story through playing the game. I still wanted to incorporate Tableau, but Figma was a way to design a project in a way that I understood better. This is the one that will be my summer project! I will also use the summer to practice more with Tableau Public, because I would really like to redesign these visualizations.

I would say that I excelled the most in finding a data story. Sorting the data and finding an interesting piece of it that I wanted to focus on was the most fun part of the process for me, because I never knew what was going to be in the data set until I jumped into it. This was the first class where I didn’t have as much creative freedom to choose my topic, and I had to adjust to finding something within a data set I was given.

best work

I initially chose the blockbuster movie data set because I knew it would be a challenge. There were over 400 movies spanning 50 years, and dozens of series within that collection. It was a lot of work to sort, and not everything could be filtered at the same time, which was incredibly frustrating to work with. However, it was in realizing that I couldn’t filter audience and critic scores at the same time that I found my data story: they were completely different. No matter how I sorted the data set, the scores never matched up. This peaked my interest because we put so much stock into critic scores. But if they didn’t match up with audience scores at all, who was really the better judge of a movie? This was the start of my data story.