[crjn]

Data visualization is a deep science and tightly related to business intelligence. It always start with data. You first list them as a simple table (raw data) and then you decide how best to show it to the world. So you start aggregating, clustering, ranking etc to refine the data and come to conclusions yourself.

Once you come to conclusion, you keep rethinking and validating that these are the right conclusions and once confirmed the next challenge is how to articulate your conclusions to the world.

You then go to your designer and give enough information to be translated to infographics/dashboard. You see it is a very involved process.

I always think my data can be easily converted to a bar chart, line or pie chart. Rest all are variations of the same. If you have a third dimension then you go to bubble or scatter charts. So visualization without data is just a wireframe