Resources

Adobe’s Color (color.adobe.com/create) is an online tool for creating, exploring, and sharing color palettes, including complementary, analogous, and custom harmony rules, with community-shared themes and accessibility checks.

Chroma.js is a lightweight JavaScript library for color manipulation and interpolation, supporting conversions across color spaces (RGB, HSL, Lab, LCH, etc.), color scales, blending, and integration with ColorBrewer palettes.

Coblis – Color Blindness Simulator (color-blindness.com) lets you upload an image and view it through different types of color vision deficiencies, making it easier to understand and design for colorblind accessibility.

ColorBrewer (colorbrewer2.org) is a web tool for selecting color schemes tailored for maps and data visualizations, offering palettes that are sequential, diverging, or qualitative — and filtered for print, colorblind-safe, and display suitability.

Colorblindly is a Chrome extension that simulates various types of color blindness on any website, helping designers ensure their work is accessible and visually effective for all users.

Coolors.co is an intuitive online color scheme generator that lets you quickly produce, tweak, and export cohesive palettes — perfect for designers and artists looking for fast inspiration.

The Data Visualisation Catalogue (datavizcatalogue.com) is an online reference that presents a wide variety of chart types and visual forms, organized by function or data type, to help users choose the right visualization method.

Inkscape (inkscape.org) is a free, open-source vector graphics editor often seen as an alternative to Adobe Illustrator, offering powerful tools for creating and editing scalable vector artwork.

Pilestone Blind Vision Simulator (pilestone.com) is an online tool that allows you to see how images appear under different types of color blindness, helping designers and educators create more accessible visuals.

ArcGIS StoryMaps (storymaps.arcgis.com) is a platform for creating interactive, narrative-driven “map stories” that blend maps, multimedia, text, and layouts into immersive visual storytelling.

StoryMapJS is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events. Built at the Northwestern University Knight Lab by a team of technologist and journalists working at advancing news medica innovation.

Alberto Cairo is a leading scholar and practitioner in data visualization, and on albertocairo.com he showcases his books, blog writing, and resources. Key works include The Functional Art (2013), The Truthful Art (2016), How Charts Lie (2019), and The Art of Insight (2023). He also writes essays and articles on chart ethics, visual literacy, and design theory.

Cartography. by Kenneth Field is a beautiful reference guide for all things cartographic. his sage compendium for contemporary mapmakers distills the essence of cartography into useful topics, organized for convenience in finding the specific idea or method you need. Unlike books targeted to deep scholarly discourse of cartographic theory, this book provides sound, visually compelling information that translates into practical and useful tools for modern mapmaking.

Data Points: Visualization That Means Something by Nathan Yau. This book focuses on the graphics side of data analysis. Using examples from art, design, business, statistics, cartography, and online media, he explores both standard-and not so standard-concepts and ideas about illustrating data.

The Data Storyteller's Handbook: How to create business impact using data storytelling by Kat Greenbrook is a practical, illustrated guide to becoming a skilled Data Storyteller. Based on a proven workshop structure and designed for busy professionals, it's the perfect resource to quickly enhance your data communication skills.

Written by Stephanie D. H. Evergreen, Effective Data Visualization shows readers how to create Excel charts and graphs that best communicate their data findings. This comprehensive how-to guide functions as a set of blueprints―supported by both research and the author’s extensive experience with clients in industries all over the world―for conveying data in an impactful way.

Written by our own Jami Dennis, with technical editor Eva Reid, GIS for Dummies 2nd Edition gives you the basics of data analysis, interpretation, and modeling using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This entry-level GIS book allows you to gain the skills to read and interpret all types of maps and visual GIS information.

Flowing Data is a fabulous website run by author and expert visualizer, Nathan Yau. Through articles, books, and tutorials he explores how we use analysis and visualization to understand data and ourselves.

Practical Charts: The Essential Guide to Creating Clear, Compelling Charts for Reports and Presentations by Nick Desbarats. This book provides easy-to-follow, concrete guidelines that quickly enable chart makers of any experience level to design expert-level charts that are clear and compelling. Readers will learn how to tackle over 90% of the chart design challenges that arise in real-world situations and how to avoid over 90% of the common mistakes that chart creators make.

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds, now in its third edition, covers advances in PowerPoint, Keynote, and other presentation technology. Garr tackles storytelling through slides and shares his approach to effective presentation design. A must-have for anyone wanting to create effective presentation slide decks.

Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte is full of practical approaches to visual story development that can be applied by anyone. The book combines conceptual thinking and inspirational design, with insightful case studies from the world's leading brands.

Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic is a bestselling book that teaches how to communicate effectively with data by combining clear visuals, thoughtful design, and compelling narrative techniques. It emphasizes simplicity, audience focus, and using storytelling to make data-driven insights memorable and persuasive.

Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice! by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic is a hands-on companion to her first book, offering practical exercises and real-world examples to help readers strengthen their data visualization and storytelling skills. It’s designed as a workbook to apply concepts through practice and experimentation.

Storytelling with Data's online community is the companion website to Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic's bestselling book by the same name. The website offers articles, tips, tutorials, and community challenges for building your Storytelling with Data skills.

Public speaking coach and bestselling author Carmine Gallo has broken down hundreds of TED talks and interviewed the most popular TED presenters, as well as the top researchers in the fields of psychology, communications, and neuroscience to reveal the nine secrets of all successful TED presentations. Gallo's step-by-step method makes it possible for anyone to deliver a presentation that is engaging, persuasive, and memorable.