How to get your design ideas through a client
This article was originally published on Nightingale website. Read this article in French here or em portugues aqui. Clients are an easy target to blame for our failings as designers. We like to think that it is their fault if our brilliant ideas never make it to production due to their lack of taste and […]
How an infographic became an illustration
The latest project in our portfolio shows how an infographic request can lead to many places. It started like most projects, with a report full of facts and figures about an important topic: the role of drinking water in conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. The client came prepared with data and messages […]
Our first interactive: the masked dashboard
In the coming months, we will finally be updating our portfolio to better reflect what Voilà: has become over the last couple of years. Today, we are adding what was then our first interactive, developed in late 2020, for FinDev Canada, an international development agency. This was a breakthrough for our team of four at […]
500,000 dots is too many
The more I think about today’s front page of the New York Times, the more it is for me another watershed moment for data visualization. But not for good reasons. This graph is confronting us with the limitations of data visualization to convey tragedies. Tragedies like COVID-19 deaths happen at the individual level. One death […]
Retrospective 2020
The Holidays put me in a reflective mood. Or maybe it’s one month of John Lennon singing in my ears “So this is Christmas. And what have you done?” So here goes. Two new hires Obviously, new personnel is on top of the highlights reel. In the spring, it became clear that the growth of […]
How to tell the truth in charts
A review of How Charts Lie, by Alberto Cairo Charts are never neutral; they are rhetorical devices. Their creators select the data, the framing, and the encoding much like orators do with verbal language. They choose a perspective and, ideally, the readers question it. But not all designers and readers are skilled at or even aware […]
The case against electoral maps
If there is one type of visualization that the world has been looking at lately, it’s US electoral maps. Ever since Trump paraded his favourite map of the 2016 election results, the dataviz community and beyond has been discussing better ways to represent accurately the results of the election. But if anything, what the election […]
The best visualizations and charts (so far) to understand the coronavirus (COVID-19)
Voilà: has not yet published a single chart about the COVID-19 pandemic yet, despite being specialized in data visualization. This is because the subject is currently best left to the specialists. The data is much less reliable and comparable than one might assume and the subject of epidemiology is highly complex. If we do give […]
How we rebranded an information design firm
How do you build a brand — which is meant to differentiate and associate — for a firm in a field that is still relative new and unknown by its potential clients? This was the tension at the heart of the rebranding. Should we incarnate the field, at the risk of being generic among our […]
From Voilà to Voilà:
Today is a big day at the end of a big year for Voilà:. After six years of operation, it was time to grow from a one-person outfit to a proper company. We are now making this official online. I always wanted to do more and do it better than I could by myself. I […]
