In late 2021, Ken and I chose our favorite Tableau Public vizzes ever. Then in 2022, we started an annual tradition of choosing our favorite vizzes of the year, this time was for 2021. We continued that tradition in 2022 and 2023...and are doing it again for 2024. In this blog post, we will reveal our ten favorite vizzes of 2024 starting at number ten and moving down to our favorite viz of the year. For each, we will provide a small screenshot, but we encourage you to click on the links to see them in their full glory. Please note that although I am composing this blog post, all of the selections and commentary were developed as a team between Ken and me.
But before we press on, we do have some ground rules.
1) Tableau Only: We think that Tableau is the Bees Knees, so all of our selections were built in Tableau and published to Tableau Public.
2) Data Visualizations Only: Throughout the year, people create some absolutely amazing and incredibly useful instructional workbooks on Tableau Public. We love these so much, but for this list, we will be focusing on “pure” data visualizations only.
3) No Flerlages: We can't pick any of our own vizzes or each other’s.
4) Brian Moore Rule (also known as the Adam McCann or the Kasia Gąsiewska-Holc Rule): We will pick no more than one viz from any single author.
5) Attribution: we chose these vizzes because we love them. We will do our very best to provide information about the author's original inspiration and give attribution if applicable. That said, we did not create these vizzes so we simply may not know where the author was inspired.
6) There are Thousands of Amazing Vizzes: There were soooo many amazing visualizations published to Tableau Public this year, way more than we could ever begin to mention here in this blog post. If you don't get a mention here, don't worry. Keep learning, keep creating, keep inspiring others, and keep doing amazing work!
Okay, before we move on, you might be wondering why the title image shows a dog wearing sunglasses while playing the guitar and singing. Well, doggonit (😉), that dog rocks just like all these vizzes. And, like last year, Bing Image Creator is also one of our favorite things from 2024 😊.
Before we get to the top ten, we'd like to mention three that nearly made out top ten...we will call them honorable mention, but you can just call them number 11 through 13.
Honorable Mention
Rekindling the Flame by Blake Feiza: Neither Ken or I are all that much into Pokemon, but it doesn't take a Pokemon expert to know that this viz is absolutely incredible and 100% on brand. The charts are clean and easy to understand, the images are perfectly selected, and the layout...wow, the layout is incredible. This is Blake's first IronViz entry and I'd bet on him ending up in the top 10...maybe even the top 3. (Note: you can register here to watch the top 10 being announced on January 14.)
Meet the Simpsons by David Kelly: Ken and I are big fans of fun! That fandom extends to Tableau vizzes. In this #DataPlusTV viz, David Kelly nails the fun aspect. From the background image, to the charts that perfectly match the look and feel of the Simpsons, to Bart's eyes that follow you as you navigate - fun is the main ingredient. As Homer, Marge, and Bart once sang to (at) Lisa (the vegetarian), "you don't win friends with salad". Folks, this viz ain't no salad.
My Capsule Wardrobe Chart by Judit Bekker: it's not uncommon to see Judit on our favorites list. In fact, she was on our original top ten list (our top ten vizzes ever) back in 2021. She's an incredible designer, but also an absolute master of packing so much information into a single chart. This viz is no different. Incredible work!
Okay, now onto the top ten. We will go in descending order starting with number 10 and count down to our favorite viz of the year.
In this viz, Liza analyzes the colors and details of 37 self-portraits painted by Van Gogh in order to help us see the world through his eyes. Not only is this viz incredibly creative, but it's also beautifully designed, easy to interact with, and simple to understand. We are in love with this viz...but not so much that we will be cutting any ears off 😉.
This viz looks like a business dashboard that you might see on a ride in an amusement part. It's so clean, modern, and just perfect. I love the topic (especially the Data + Love podcast rising to the top), but even if you don't dig into the details, the design of these charts and this dashboard as a whole...well, it's superbly done. The colors, the chart selections, the fonts...perfection!
How talented is Harim Jung? When we first looked at this dashboard, obviously the radial chart caught our eyes, but what we like most is the colors! What great colors. The rest of the dashboard utilizes very standard charts but built in an incredibly pleasing manner. We also love the background image containers that are subtle - not too much difference in the background color and container color and not an overuse of shadows. Great work!
We grew up in a "Saturday Night Live" family. Our parents "taped" every episode on VHS. Some of our earliest memories are from this show. And yeah, we probably saw a few skits that we shouldn't have watched at such a young age. When we were 8 or 9, we watched a R-rated skit with some friends up the street. They asked their parents what a specific word meant...and well, they weren't allowed to watch SNL any longer. We both still watch it every week and there is usually at least one nugget every episode. If you haven't seen the George Washington skits starring Nate Bargatze, go watch them now!
Okay okay, this blog post is about our favorite vizzes, not about our favorite shows. But this viz combines those things as Zsofia visualizes frequent hosts of the show over their 50 seasons. The chord diagram is stunning, but our favorite part is the "building" chart at the bottom made to look like a city skyline. So creative! By the way, a bunch of these hosts just appeared on the show when Martin Short joined the "fiver timers club".
If we had to vote for the "Biggest Growth" vizzie right now, we would both vote for Ann Pregler. She has been on fire this year! In fact, when we did our first "pass" of our favorite vizzes, she had 3 in our top 20 or so. This viz is fairly simple; it shows the cookies that she's making for Christmas and uses a sankey to show the corresponding ingredients. This viz is superbly designed, a beautiful one-color sankey, and we can't say we've ever seen a viz with this color background. It's perfectly designed. We are both addicted to this viz nearly as much as we are addicted to snickerdoodles!
Some vizzes just make you think, "dangit, why didn't I think of that?". This is absolutely one of those vizes. It's simple, what do Americans spend their money on during the Halloween season. And there are just 3 answers. Sure, we could have done this with bars or a line chart, but would anybody look at it? The creative way of showing this data is so engaging and at the same time, easy to read and understand. And we love the way she reversed the axis for this chart...it works perfectly.
Lisa was this year's honorary Brian Moore / Adam McCann / Kasia Gąsiewska-Holc. We struggled to pick just one of hers to go into our top 10. Not only is she incredibly talented within the tool and an amazing designer, but she is just soooooo damn creative! She comes up with such unique ideas...well, we are jealous.
If you don't know Lisa, first, where have you been? But she is a Tableau Visionary, the 2021 IronViz Champion, the 2023 TC Tip Battle Champion, a Tableau User Group leader, and a mom of a toddler. In this viz, she visualizes Mean Girls to celebrate the release of Mean Girls 2. Below we only show 3 of the 10 views in her "burn book". Clearly Lisa isn't just a regular mom, she's a cool mom!
This viz is all about Romantic Comedies. We both agree that love stories aren't generally our favorite types of movies, but Ken and I are in a bit of a love triangle with this viz! (I hope the viz picks me). This viz has that great combination of analysis, storytelling, and design...oh wow, that design! We have to give her a shoutout on the caricatures she created using Midjourney. In our experience, these are not easy to create in a way that they look like the actual people or that they are consistent. It's superbly done. This one definitely competed for our favorite viz of the year.
We've preached it for a while now...Kasia may be the best Tableau practitioner in the world. Her design skills are second to none and just read one of her guest blog posts on our website to realize that she's also a technical wizard.
Kasia has landed on all four previous "favorite vizzes" blog posts and videos we've created. She was in the first spot in 2023, the first spot in 2022, the 4th spot in 2021 and has a viz on our favorite vizzes ever list. This year, she lands in the second spot with this ridiculous viz about the greatest albums of all time. Of course, she does it in a stunning fashion by visualizing these albums using the grooves of records. Yeah, that's right. And she uses color in such a way to make it look like light reflecting off of the records. We showed this viz at a Salesforce event and people were absolutely in awe. Kasia, please keep building mind-blowing vizzes like this one!
Okay, drumroll please...
Our favorite viz of 2024 is:
Heather has done some incredible work this year, and this one is just...wow! This viz was shared out in early Summer, long before most people knew that there were AI tools to create actual songs in different genres. When we saw this, well, we were both blown away. From my perspective (Kevin), I thought the songs were creative, well thought out, and funny...but they were also catchy! I actually created a playlist of my favorite 10 or so songs from this viz. I also posted on Twitter that this was one of my favorite vizzes of the year and one of my favorite vizzes ever.
If you haven't seen it, I don't want to ruin the fun...go check it out immediately!
Okay, that's it for our 2024 favorites. What can we say...the creativity in our community just keeps leveling up year after year. We can't wait to see what 2025 brings.
Thank you for another awesome year and thank you for everyone who has visited our website. We cannot tell you how much we appreciate it. Happy New Year!
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