Before my current job in data, I was a Data Journalist for 4-5 years. Frustrated by the limitations of Datawrapper and Flourish, I vowed one day to learn D3 so I could create the custom visuals I adored to look at in the wild. Things like scrollable streamgraphs, scrollable charts, and...okay I just liked scrollytelling.

Fast forward some years, and circumstances mean I finally had the chance to learn d3. It's been just over a year. I've hacked together a flourish scrollytelling story, and I recreated some of the flourish template charts I've used in my newsletter in d3... but nothing that had that oomph that I got from reading something from The Pudding or one of The Economist's in-depth essays.

I picked up The Odyssey for another writing project (not related to the movie, but I guess its in the zeitgeist) a few months ago, and while reading and listening to some lectures I was gripped by an essay. I also was gripped by a few cool visual animations I could do in d3 and svg to help tell the story.

A bit of furious coding, tweaking vector graphics, a crash course in animating things with CSS (yes, a bit of LLMs helped with that, but not as much as you think, this is an art project after all), and a bunch of rewrites and e voila - the project I'm most proud of so far.