Data Visualized
By: Isabel Sierra Y Gomez De Leon
Tags: Bloomberg, Data Visualization, Dataviz, Branding, Design

Data Visualized

Data can be a scary thing.

Data can be abstract, obscure. It sometimes disguises as complex charts and mind-blowing Excel sheets. It can be incredibly hard to digest if you don’t pay a real close look. Yet in the post-information era big data, alt data, quant data… data controls everything that our world depends on in a really fundamental way.

At Bloomberg, data is at the very epicenter of what we do: it helps our clients make important decisions that changes their business through the Bloomberg Terminal and our enterprise solutions. Data fuels the information and analysis that powers our media organization. We use data to protect the oceans, design smarter cities and inform the important work that our philanthropic organization does for the world. The breadth and quality of our data, the technology that we build around — this is what differentiates Bloomberg from its competitors and what makes us provide an invaluable contribution to our clients and partners.

As a creative team that works across all of Bloomberg’s products and services, accurately represent the power of our data and what it does is our most important job.

This article brings you a few examples of how we do this, how we think out of the box to reach our audiences while doing it, and a few learning points that will help you leverage design and innovation to tell data-driven stories in a compelling way.

01. Data visualization is built on discovery

I’ll start with an awesome project that we just launched. Our team at the Studio recently came up with an AR web app that allows anyone to investigate business data, news and analysis straight from the Bloomberg Terminal when scanning any logo, as long as the branding scanned product belongs to a publicly-traded company.

We call this product Bloomberg Vision and it helps us visualize how financial data is linked to the products we use every day. It has also become a great tool to explain what our company does to people who know nothing about us. We use it in career fairs and events across the globe as a way to get people excited about what we do.

This experiment also has helped us understand that compelling data visualization is built on discovery. People are interested in understanding the hidden forces that affect the world they live in. Compelling data visualization is able to connect the dots between two seemingly distant realities.

Let’s look at another example of two interconnected realities through a practical exercise.

February last year, cosmetics billionaire Kylie Jenner (she’s just 22, let’s take a second to assimilate that) was probably bored sitting on the Jenner Calabasas mansion. While thinking of how to shave off a few dollars of her community management budget, she send out this innocent tweet into the stratosphere:

This harmless tweet sent Snap Inc. on a downward spiral losing 1.3 billion of his market value in 24h. Obviously Snap has more than recovered its market value ever since. But at the time, cosmetics brands such as Maybeline and L’Oreal were questioning if they should even still be on Snapchat at all.

Now, let’s improvise a design exercise on our own minds.

Close your eyes for a second and try to imagine how you’d illustrate this incredibly dramatic moment.

Think of a diagram that’s both clear and impactful.

You got it?

Let’s see — first you need two variables. The first one time — market opening and closing on that cold day of February. We can plot Snap’s stock value on the Y axis.