{"id":2862,"date":"2025-02-03T16:46:56","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T16:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adammarton.com\/?p=2862"},"modified":"2026-02-06T20:14:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T20:14:12","slug":"2025-1-15-illustrator-graphics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adammarton.com\/?p=2862","title":{"rendered":"Elevate your graphics with Illustrator"},"content":{"rendered":"

This tutorial is from a session I conducted at NICAR 2025 in Minneapolis: Elevate your graphics with Illustrator.\u00a0<\/em>I did a similar session the year before, at NICAR 2024, with Paroma Soni from Politico.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

See the graphics I made for this presentation here<\/a><\/p>\n

This document will walk you through how to use Adobe Illustrator and Flourish Studio to create a heatmap that displays the rate of COVID-19 deaths by U.S. state between May 2020 and December 2022. The graphic will also display vaccine milestones.<\/p>\n

Requirements:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. A free account at flourish.studio<\/li>\n
  2. A copy of Adobe Illustrator (this can also be done using the free vector graphics program Inkscape)<\/li>\n
  3. An understanding of the very basics of Adobe Illustrator.
    \nNote: Here is a     great video<\/a> that will show you some Illustrator basics. You can find other shorter videos on YouTube. All you need to understand is how to use a few basic tools.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    How to make a heatmap showing COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. during the pandemic<\/strong><\/h2>\n
      \n
    1. Download the data.<\/a> This data displays COVID-19 deaths per 100 people by state for each month between May 2020 – December 2022. The data is from the CDC<\/a> and state population numbers were obtained from the US Census (to calculate the rates per 100k).<\/li>\n
    2. Open Flourish.studio<\/a>. Start a new visualization. Under \u201cHeat map,\u201d select \u201cCategorical Heatmap\u201d to open a graphic template.<\/li>\n
    3. Select the \u201cdata\u201d tab. Delete all the data that came with the template. Copy and paste our data (from step 1).<\/li>\n
    4. On the right side of the data tab, map X to the month\/year column, Y to the state column, and Value to the deaths per 100k column, like so:
      \n\"\"<\/li>\n
    5. Switch to the preview tab. Make changes to the graphic via the tabs on the right side of the screen. I would suggest the following:
      \nA. Under the Heatmap tab, set cell padding to 0 and height to 1.
      \n\"\"
      \nB. Under the Color tab, select \u201cNumeric,\u201d \u201cSequential,\u201d and \u201cLinear.\u201d You might consider a custom color palette or choose one of the palettes baked into Flourish.
      \n\"\"C. Move the x-axis to the top. Set it to a 45 degree angle
      \n\"\"D. Go through the tabs and make any other changes you think are needed!<\/li>\n
    6. Select \u201cExport and publish\u201d then \u201cPublish to share and embed\u201d then \u201cPublish.\u201d<\/li>\n
    7. Select \u201cExport and publish\u201d again, then \u201cDownload Image.\u201d Change the image format to SVG and download.
      \n\"\"<\/li>\n
    8. Open the downloaded SVG in Illustrator. The easiest way is to right click on the file and select Open with – Adobe Illustrator. Click through or ignore any warnings Illustrator throws.<\/li>\n
    9. In Illustrator, select File -> Document Setup -> Edit Artboards. Make your canvas bigger so you have some room to add elements.<\/li>\n
    10. Add your annotations. For each of the items below, draw a vertical line from the top of the heat map to the bottom at the appropriate month. Add the text at the bottom of the line (below the graphic). Style the annotations as you see fit. An example is below.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Dec.14, 2020:<\/em><\/strong> The first deliveries of the COVID-19 vaccines began
      \nNov. 21, 2021:<\/em><\/strong> Age 18+ eligible for COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters
      \nJan. 10, 2022:<\/em><\/strong> Everyone age 12+ eligible for booster<\/p>\n

      Source<\/a>
      \n\"\"<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Add your legend. You can recreate it using Illustrator\u2019s gradient tool. Or, for an easier method, take a screenshot of the legend from Flourish and paste that into your Illustrator canvas.<\/li>\n
      2. Use the text tool to add a headline, chatter and source. Style as you see fit.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        My final version:<\/p>\n

        \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        Vector graphics programs like Illustrator are great tools for creating beautiful, unique data visualizations and graphics \u2013 but it doesn\u2019t need to all be done from scratch. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2862","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-words"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2862"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/adammarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3015,"href":"https:\/\/adammarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2862\/revisions\/3015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adammarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adammarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}