To coincide with my book launch event in London on Thursday 6th February I’m happy to also launch not one, not two, but THREE book giveaway contests! [7th Feb Update: And now to also include the results of these contests!]
When I released the previous editions of my book, I enjoyed running some contests to allow people to win a prize of a copy of each book. They proved to be a lot of fun (some of the links/embedded submissions have sadly decayed, especially through the subsequent demise of Twitter).
1st Edition
- #Graphiti – briefing and result
- #BestWorstViz – briefing and result
- #Bookshopped – briefing and result
2nd Edition
- #PetsWinPrizes- briefing and result
- #BlobHope – briefing and result
- #BookStock – briefing and result
For the release of my 3rd Edition, I am thrilled to outline for your consideration the following book-prize giveaway contests: Best Worst Viz, Book-Marked, and Star-Books.
The briefings for each are detailed below. To enter, simply send me your submissions via email or share them – and tag me – on Bluesky, LinkedIn, or Instagram. If you post your submissions anywhere else I won’t see them. You have to be in it to win it, but I have to see it for you to maybe win it too!
You can submit entries for each contest, just not multiple entries for one. (Remember that, sometimes, very few people actually enter contests assuming loads of other people will.)
The submission window remains open until (updated) midnight on Wednesday 5th February. The audience at my book launch event will then assist me in picking winners for each contest who will be the beneficiary of a free copy of my book. I’ll get in touch with the winners from Monday 10th Feb.
1. BEST WORST VIZ
For this contest I’m not interested in the best best, rather the best worst. This is a repeat running of this contest having done it for a previous book edition. I love it as an exercise activity in general so I’m doing it again now.
It is not hard to find examples of what we might call ‘bad’ visualisation made by others but the essence of this challenge is based on your worst visualisation: What is the absolute worst visualisation you can possibly deliberately make?
You have freedom to create whatever you like, on whatever subject, using whatever data. It just has to be really really bad, maybe incorporating as many of the typically-considered bad practices or just one that is so devilishly simple in its brilliant badness.
It might be the ugliest possible design form or the most impenetrable accessibility. It might offer the most spurious claim of causality or demonstrate the shoddiest of data treatments. It might already exist in your archives or be a brand new piece you create.
The key thing is that it has to be your work, not some defenceless person’s work found through a random web search nor can it be some default slop created by GenAI. Be liberated, make it bad, but do make it yourself.
With some assistance from my book launch crowd, I will determine which submission I feel most encapsulates the spirit of the best worst viz.
Good luck. May the worst be with you.
7th Feb update: THE RESULT!
There were many entries, thanks to all who participated! During my book launch I presented all submissions and then I took the liberty of reducing the entries to four especially brilliantly terrible works (the others, whilst demonstrating elements of badness were simply not bad enough, I’m sorry to say).
The four finalists were entries from A. Jason Cross, B. Felix Bernoully, C. Haim Shternshus and D. Nick Kelly. To decide whose was the worst, I went through each piece and asked the crowd to indicate through their choice of noise and volume (the cheer or clap was the most common method adopted) which should be declared the winner and I’m very happy to say that Felix was victorious!
However, that is not the end of the prize-giving. There was an additional entry from Julie Brunet that blew me away and likewise that of the audience. Julie took this idea of BestWorstViz to a whole new level. I hope she doesn’t mind me sharing the description she offered in her submission email…
I took a look at previous entries and saw people took basically 2 roads: designing an eye-sore of a chart or crafting a witty yet confusing as hell viz. These approaches require you to be either festively lazy or devilishly clever, neither I could bring myself to be. But then I thought “Don’t we actually cherish bad charts? Don’t we put them in a folder aside, as precious little monsters?” and that reminded me of Panini football albums French kids have, where they collect football players’ stickers to put them in an album. So my entry is actually a poster that you have to complete with stickers of worst viz, compiling some of the most recurrent “errors” in visualization! You can see the finale poster completed, a little animation of the poster being completed and an export of the stickers (as well as mockups because mockups are cool) Wouldn’t this poster actually be a very fun tool to have to teach dataviz fundamentals?? That would be amazing to have it printed with the stickers for real but I don’t think I’d be able to figure out the logistics to be honest!
It is such a brilliant idea, I love the the thinking behind it and the execution, so I could not fail to mark Julie’s work with a bonus award of a book. Bravo, Julie!
2. BOOK-MARKED
Who has evidence that they have physically used my book the most? I’m not talking about the things you’ve possibly made as a result of reading it, rather the extent to which there are markings to show it has been read.
I state clearly in the introduction to each edition of this book that I wanted it and want it to be useful but used. No point it sitting on a book shelf in perfect condition but having never been read.
So for this contest I would like to have people send me pics of any edition of my book with your pen markings, highlighted passages, scribbles and notes, folds in the top corners, flattened creases as you’ve weighed it down with a heavy object to keep a spread open, and of course bookmark stickies emerging from the edges of saved pages.
You can submit more than one photograph of your used and marked book, using the methods outlined above, and the winner will be the person who has clearly left their mark on using the book!
7th Feb update: THE RESULT!
There were no entries! Not one! So nobody won and the book that was allocated to this contest was shifted up to a second award for the BestWorstViz.
3. STAR-BOOKS
The final contest is perhaps the easiest. All I want for this one is for you to nominate an up-and-coming data viz superstar whom you think would be either most deserving of or would most benefit from winning a copy of the book.
To enter just send me, using the methods listed above, their name and your brief argument for why they qualify as a star who needs a book.
Please don’t nominate yourself. It probably won’t lead to a victory.
7th Feb update: THE RESULT!
Thanks to her nomination from Attila Bátorfy I’m very happy to say Edit Gyenge has won the ‘StarBooks’ prize.
