My #MakeoverMonday journey started while I was exploring the best ways to learn Tableau. I was going through the work of some of the Featured Authors on Tableau Public and was quite impressed by the quality of their work. It didn’t pass my notice that many of them tagged their work with #MakeoverMonday. With a quick search on Google, I learned about MakeoverMonday and got to know about it that It is a community project run by Andy and Eva. They started this project to build a platform to help people to create more effective and meaningful visualizations. The website has necessary details on how to Participate in #MakeoverMonday, get the Viz reviewed and other required details to get started.
During this journey, I learned a lot and hence I would like to share my experience on how it benefitted me and why one should #MakeoverMonday.
1. Every week a new project
MakeoverMonday runs weekly projects. With most of the projects having just enough data which you can handle every week with your other jobs. it gives you a quick practice on how you can enhance your Visualizations skills. And as they say the more you practice the better you get.
2. Get inspired by the community
There are approx 100-200 people who post their MakeoverMonday work every week. I appreciate and admire how differently people visualize the same dataset. In the first week itself, I was fascinated by the diversity of ideas people have. And this is what I feel is the biggest learning opportunity I had from this Project. So you will get tonnes of inspirations and ideas to do better and think out of the box.
3. Learn from feedback
As we have quite skillful people in the community and many of the times they give you very helpful feedback. I have learned a lot from the feedback from the community for my Vizzes; or even from the feedback provided to others. I learned that visualizations should be easily understandable to a larger audience, and it should be complete on its whole that anyone could decipher the charts and story behind it. If you had to explain it then maybe you need to reiterate. So take feedback in a positive way and learn from them.
4. MMVizReview
MMVizReview is the most helpful part while participating in this project, where you can get feedback on your Viz from Eva and Sarah. You need to add #MMVizReview in your tweet and join the live webinar as per the MakeoverMonday website. I have got many of my Vizzes reviewed through MMVizReview. Its is remarkable how detailed and valuable feedback they provide in these reviews, with crisp pointers on how to improve on your viz.
5. Build your portfolio
I worked actively on MakeoverMonday projects and even before I realized I have made a good number of Vizzes. Moreover, the quality of work which I did also got improved over the period. I would suggest that you should regularly participate in this project and in no time you will see the number Vizzes grow on your Tableau Public, which can be showcased anywhere and be proud of.
So that’s how MakeoverMonday helped me in getting better in visualizing and building stories around data. I am sure there are many many more benefits by participating in MakeoverMonday, so give it a try and I am certain in no time you will love #MakeOverMonday as much as I do. Happy Learning!!!
