The subreddit “Data Art” has become really popular over the years. When r/DataArt reached 10,000 subscribers, the moderator u/jmerlinb decided to personally send out a DataVizDigest email summarizing the top posts of that season every 3 months. “Because data should not only be informative, but also beautiful.” If you're interested, you can sign up for their mailing list. Also, make sure to check out the most upvoted posts on the "ArtyCharty" Twitter page!

Bored Panda got in touch with Jack Merlin Bruce, also known as u/jmerlinb, the moderator of the "Data Art" subreddit. We were intrigued to learn about the inspiration behind the creation of this subreddit. Jack revealed that during the early stages of his career in data visualization, he crafted a lot of designs for various fandom communities on Reddit, such as r/GameOfThrones, r/Pokemon, and r/Chess. “I wanted to show them their passion in a new way, and for me to get a chance to design stuff I thought looked really cool. Stuff you might want to hang up on your wall, or that you would see in a coffee table book.”

“It was great fun,” the moderator continued, “And these works I produced tended to be quite successful in these fan communities, but were significantly less successful in the one place I thought they would have been a natural fit for - and that was (at the time) the world's largest data visualization: r/DataIsBeautiful. And this was strange to me, seeing as they were so well received in other spaces.”

“But this isn't actually a surprise once you look into the stated aim on the sidebar of r/DataIsBeautiful: ‘Aesthetics are an important part of information visualization, but pretty pictures are not the sole aim of this subreddit.’ In other words, there are two sides to all data visualizations: the story, and the aesthetics. On one extreme, you can have a chart made in 1990s Microsoft Excel that looks horrendous but yet tells a great story. On the other extreme, you can have a chart meticulously designed by a world-class graphics designer which looks stunning in the aesthetics department but has no meat to it, no story. There's nothing inherently wrong with either type, it just depends on what your audience is expecting - and r/DataIsBeautiful catered to the first example... but I soon came to realize there was no community at the time that catered to the second example, to the ‘pretty pictures’. And so /r/DataArt was born - a subreddit for visualizations you ‘could hang up on your living room wall’.”