Nicola Rennie

At the end of July, I delivered one of this year’s Ihaka Lectures at the University of Auckland.

Chord diagrams are a type of chart that can be used to show relationships or flows between categories.

Quarto is one of my favourite tools for authoring, whether those documents contain code or not.

Quarto is a publishing system that lets you write documents that combine text and code in one place.

In order to make a chart effective, aesthetic, and accessible, you will almost always need to adjust the default styling - regardless of which programming language or packages you use.

Choosing the right chart type is key to creating an effective visualisation of your data.

You might be wondering what exactly is a beeswarm chart?

It’s a myth that accessibility means compromising on aesthetics.

To close out 2025, here’s a quick round up of some of the things I’ve been up to, alongside highlighting some of my favourite data visualisations I’ve seen this year!

Ever thought about using R to make a poster?

Generative AI tools have been around for a little while now, and they’re mostly advertised as being able to help you with writing, coding, and reasoning.

After almost four years of weekly contributions to TidyTuesday (a weekly social data project), I’ve worked with almost 200 datasets and created over 200 data visualizations.

If you’re an R user, you might be curious about trying another programming language.

Hugo is an open-source static site generator built with Go, which uses markdown files and templates to generate static HTML pages.

When it comes to choosing an IDE to install there are lots of different choices out there, each with different pros and cons.

If you’ve been following these blog posts for a little while, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of TidyTuesday, a weekly social data project where participants explore a new dataset, create something from it (often a visualisation), and share the result and…

Making a bad chart As part of the 30 Day Chart Challenge in April 2025, I made a (deliberately) bad chart, which didn’t follow any data visualisation best practices: There are many things wrong with this chart, to list just some of them: Structural elemen…

The 30 Day Chart Challenge is a data visualisation challenge organised by Cédric Scherer and Dominic Royé.

Observable is a JavaScript-based reactive programming environment, commonly used for interactive data exploration, visualisation, and dashboards.

What is data-driven art?