For the past 4 years, around December I would start preparing data for my annual Travel dashboard. This year was a little bit trickier. I left my job as a consultant where I was traveling a lot, and we had a pandemic forcing us to stay home. While in the past I would get on a plane multiple times per month, in 2020 I honestly left my house at most twice a month.
For 2020, we originally had some grand travel plans – Mexico City for Formula 1, a trip to Machu Picchu in Peru, and 8 out of town weddings we had been invited to! Obviously, plans ended up changing. This year I did not leave the country, and in an attempt to stay safer, Ravi and I took more road trips around our local California.
Well, my lack of travel did not make a very interesting travel map. For my annual data visualization, instead I wanted to focus on how my travel habits this year changed compared to the past! I summarized data from my past visualizations, and was able to create the dashboard below.
View Tableau Dashboard as Image
I had a shower-thought to create a skyline of my travels, and I am excited with the final result! For the overall design, I was inspired by skyline posters I saw from ARCHd, when Googling “retro skyline poster”. The color palette was inspired by the results that came up when I searched “night retro city palette”.
The data source was created manually by summarizing data points on my past dashboards. For this year, I scrolled through my calendar and photos to remember the different trips we took. Our trips for 2021 are not looking optimistic, but we will see how it goes.
Check out my past travel maps on my blog: 2019 | 2018 | 2017
