Valentina D'Efilippo on Giving Data a Voice

0:00From the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, this is the Design Thinkers podcast. Design Thinkers is Canada's largest graphic design conference. Originally launched to mark the conference's 25th anniversary, the podcast now reaches a global audience of designers and creatives. Join our host, Nicola Hamilton, as she connects with Design Thinkers speakers to explore the work and ideas shaping today's design industry. Valentina DeFilippo is an information designer, creative director, and author renowned for her ability to inspire, move, and connect people through data-driven experiences.

0:39She is as equally comfortable immersed in science as she is in storytelling and graphic design. And it's that tension that's shaped nearly two decades of translating dense, unwieldy data sets into visual stories. Think flowers standing in for a century of wars, or a dandelion holding the shape of the Me Too discourse on Twitter. A cold email from HarperCollins turned an early instinct for this kind of work into a data-driven profession. An invitation to co-author the infographic history of the world alongside data journalist James Ball launched the career she now runs through her studio, Apostrophe One.

1:13In this conversation, Valentina traces her path back to a graduate thesis on gender stereotypes in children's books. It was her first real data project before she had a name for what she was doing. We talk about the responsibility of deciding what a data set reveals and what it hides, and why she reaches for beauty and visual metaphor even when the numbers are truly devastating. She also opens up about a recent project, one where she painted a mark for every lost Palestinian woman, child, press, and medical worker. She made the work alone, largely in silence, over 16 hours, and shared the process live on Instagram.

1:48This episode is for designers, journalists, and anyone who's ever had to decide how to represent a set of data and really felt the weight of that choice.

1:58Valentina D'Efilippo:Hi. Carla, how are you? How are you? Good, good. You're so? I'm good. Yeah. I wanted to start with the fact that you trained as an industrial designer before you moved into visual communication in London. I'm really curious about that like engineering adjacent training and what that sort of like gave you as you moved into design land like what design education couldn't have given you that that engineering kind of training gave you. Yeah no that's a great question actually a great opening because it seems to really kind of like give a bit of like context to how I got into data. I suppose I always had a bit of a bipolar brain.

2:44Valentina D'Efilippo:That's how I describe myself. I work well at the intersection of science and problem solving and structure and systems, but also on the other side, the arts. So the storytelling, the visuals, the graphic design. And so how did I leap from industrial design and a BA in engineering into information design or data design actually was not like a straight journey from A to B. Coming out of university, I actually did the Rasmus program here in Europe where you can study abroad for a few months. I took a year and I went to Spain and there actually industrial design was really engineering, right? It was really tough.

3:29Valentina D'Efilippo:So I started to take some elective in graphic design, branding, and the immediacy of the visual communication language with those electives really surprised me. You know, with industrial design, you go from a sketch into production, it takes about three years, right? Like with branding, you go from a sketch into a computer and then your branding can be out into the world quite quickly. So the kind of like immediacy really fascinated me. So I left the BA with this idea of like wanting to pursue do something that was more in the realm of graphic design. So I came to London to study a postgraduate in visual communication.

4:07Valentina D'Efilippo:It was very broad. And then within the course during that year, I started to experiment with information design. And I started to do data visualization without really knowing that I was actually visualizing data. There was even a field called data visualization. This was like 2006 or 20 years ago. The data visualization field wasn't as kind of form as it is now. But then out of university, although my portfolio was quite reaching to all of this data, communicated, different projects, being kind of like, yeah, I had an information design portfolio, I suppose, after my postgraduate. But out of university, I actually landed my first full-time job in advertising.

4:47And I actually stayed in advertising for four or five years, which was quite soul destroying because I totally felt like a fish out of water.

4:58Valentina D'Efilippo:it was an amazing place to be to kind of like start and learn from amazing talent amazing people around me amazing brands great budgets but the kind of like foundation of like what we were putting out into the world wasn't really speaking to my soul so I guess like in this kind of transition into professional a professional designer I was doing a bit of soul searching and this soul searching took me back into the region of like what did I study where did I find joy and the joy was actually trying to just understand something that was out into the world something that kind of called my curiosity through data and then communicating it to visual so I started to go back into self-initiated projects filling my evenings and weekends with whatever project kind of like came to mind and then this self-initiated work eventually led me to have some interviews for freelance position and also full-time position where they required somebody that had a bit more of like an information design approach to communication and so yeah there was kind of like the journey I suppose there was an opportunity that totally turned my career around.

6:19Valentina D'Efilippo:And there was a conversation with HarperCollins. I was working at the time for an advertising agency, but we were doing more like experiential work for expos, for big events. And again, during this collaboration, I was doing things that were quite complex in terms of like the type of communications that we're putting out there. And HarperCollins noticed my work online. And I suppose like it was a mix of the professional work, but also the thesis that I did on gender stereotypes at university and so forth. And I just dropped this email completely out of the blue saying, we would like to chat with you about a book of infographics, but with a narrative thread.

7:00Valentina D'Efilippo:So history, history through infographic storytelling. And that completely, like, first of all, surprised me. But also the kind of like immediate response was like, hell no, I don't know how to create a book. I haven't really created infographics professionally. But yeah, you know, when something like that knocks your door, you better actually look what there is behind the door. So we had a conversation and I was like, well, I might just as well give it a go. Obviously, I wasn't selected at that point. They were just giving me a challenge. I had to respond to the challenge. It was almost like an open brief.

7:36Valentina D'Efilippo:I put the vision of what this book might look like. And then they selected me as a co-author, an illustrator of the book. and when the book came out that was really like yeah it opened the door into this career of data design infographics data visualization data storytelling and all of that well from what I understand your graduate thesis was about gender stereotypes in children's literature which was like a pretty big data visualization project in and of its own so maybe you were doing it before you realized you were doing it yeah for sure for sure for sure and again it started with a quest a curiosity right like I was really fascinated by illustrated books actually during the post graduate was visual communication in general I wanted to create uh illustrated books for kids hoping to let to kind of like getting to maybe a publisher to become an illustrator um I wasn't that good actually at illustrating at the time but I suppose like I went down the rabbit hole of engineering uh so the methodology that I had started during my BA was very much problem solving research look out there what there is you know like really going deep into just the research so I studied about 100 books for for kids illustrated books for kids and I started to deconstruct all of the semiotics so how do men and women are represented what do they do what colors do they wear what actions what emotions are portrayed with and then I had all of these kind of like imagery and um and yes semantics and semiotics and then i went to a school a summer school in italy and i played with about 40 kids from the age of four to the age of 708 and i tested these uh stereotypes with them i wanted to kind of understand which stereotypes maybe were the strongest uh which age maybe was the most uh influenced by of stereotypes but I also did something quite interesting because I started to play around with um with sensorial experiences so for example I asked kids to to to have a bite of chocolate versus crisps so savory versus sweet or salt and sugar and to tell me whether that was like a taste that they would address to women or men so I started to gather some interesting kind of like just signals and then I put it back into an illustrated books that started to break the stereotypes and that's what was actually quite interesting coming back and putting this together my tutor at the time a brilliant professor Tony Pritchard um started to notice that actually my approach was not as strong when it came to the illustration part and it was like actually the richness of your work is the findings and size that you have actually captured with your work.

10:31Valentina D'Efilippo:So you really need to not only illustrate this book if you want to do it, but actually illustrate the findings. And so I went into just looking at data visualization examples from the past. I referenced a lot of books by Otto and Maria Neureth. And I started to basically just like illustrate what I had learned during this research. And that was the book that I think really got me to have this conversation with Harper Collins years later. It's so funny that you don't know that those projects are going to be as influential as they are when you're making them. 100%, yeah. And I wasn't even sure what I was doing back then, you know, like I was like following really like just a thought, a question and learning by making.

11:22You have described the HarperCollins, when HarperCollins reached out, they sort of paired you with an author. So you're co-authoring this book with someone named James Ball, who you don't know at all. And you've described that as an arranged marriage of sorts. I want to know a little bit about that friction, because I think often when all creative people are working with clients, you are sort of forcing two disciplines together in some way. So tell me a little bit about that arranged marriage and how it shook out.

11:51Valentina D'Efilippo:Yeah, you've done your research, Nicola. So definitely a range marriage in the sense that we didn't know each other. They were looking for complementary skills. He was an expert writer, but really with a focus on data journalism. He was actually one of the lead of the data blog here in London at The Guardian. That was actually one of the first data blogs in the world in many big media outlets. amazing talent incredible writer really quick at generating ideas but also incredibly busy he was actually reporting for the u.s election in washington dc as we started our collaboration so there was time zone difference obviously very different schedules and agenda the moment that i got the brief i actually stopped freelancing and i decided to take this six to eight months to actually create 100 infographics, which was like, how the hell do I do this?

12:48Valentina D'Efilippo:Even like with a full-time schedule, it was just a lot of work. The load was incredible. And we did actually start it to work quite well because the definition of the roles was so clear, right? Like it was doing the data research. I was doing then the kind of like visualization and the conceptual part of like, what could we pull out from this data? And then once the infographic was a bit more underway, it would write all of the commentary and the kind of text and the titles. So we had a really good kind of like workflow. But nevertheless, there was a lot of stress and there was, yeah, the challenge of just like working with somebody that you don't know.

13:28Valentina D'Efilippo:And you have maybe competing priorities in terms of like different work schedules, different priorities, et cetera, et cetera. It was not easy. But certainly, I think we came out of this challenging collaboration with just a stronger experience. Both of us have learned so much from James, and I hope that the experience was also good for him to be paired with a designer. And yeah, we have become this kind of duo, I suppose. Maybe at some point, we should repeat. Now the infographic history of the world is 12 years old. It's actually out of print. But it did so well at the beginning. We had 12 different editions in 11 different languages.

14:15So yeah, it did really well. My next question was literally, would you do it again, knowing how much work it was?

14:22Valentina D'Efilippo:so I was so um I said the the term traumatized because it was actually just so much work that I feel like I came out of this experience almost like with a postpartum depression you know this when the baby comes out and you're like refusing to look at them because it's just so much work so the book came out and I received so many invitation to talk about it to go to conferences etc etc and the last thing I wanted to do was actually talking about the book I just wanted to get on with life and do something else it took me a while to kind of like consider other briefs but on the back of the success of the book for years I received so many briefs of like can you do an infographic book about Star Wars or about this war the war and I always said no in the same capacity.

15:11Valentina D'Efilippo:So I've illustrated other books after that, like The Brain or The Second World War with Imperial Museum here, but never as a co-author. So you just take on the kind of illustration part and that's it, which is much more manageable. Until about three years ago, when Britannica approached me with this massive brief again, and this time was not 100 infographics, it was about 250 because it was not a normal book was actually an encyclopedia but I just could not say no to that book so the brief was very open was we want to reinvent the classic encyclopedia for kids and it really spoke to the Valentina probably in 2006 they wanted to create illustrated books for kids which I hadn't done it just jammed together two of your major projects right exactly and so So I was like, okay, let's do this.

16:07Valentina D'Efilippo:I suppose, though, like with much more experience, I went into this project much, much wiser. You know, like, obviously, I had 15, 17 years to kind of like own the craft and to learn actually how to transform data into visuals in a system, in a more systematic way. um but also i had a really solid brief behind it wasn't just me and a writer it was a massive team of fact checkers the britannica had we had access to six um subject matter experts so anytime we have a question in terms of like oh we're actually visualizing the universe you know you need to talk to an expert so there is so much like so many questions every time you're approaching a new brief a new data set that you need to kind of like just wrap your head around and understand fully the subject matter before you can initiate some sort of like visualization process.

17:09Valentina D'Efilippo:So just having access to these six experts was amazing and then my two co-authors was one a children writer and one was again a data journalist. So again very complementary skills, amazing editors They supported us throughout the project. And so, yeah, a much bigger effort behind it from a team perspective. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about your session at Design Thinkers. So your session description says that data doesn't speak for itself. Designers decide what to reveal, what to emphasize, and how an audience will experience its meaning. And I think it's such important information for us to take in today.

17:54as designers, but like also just people moving through a very data rich world. Like that idea that data can be manipulated is manipulated for good or bad is so fascinating. And I'm curious to ask you a little bit about how you get a data set and start to even sift through it for like, what are actual truths or what are the things that are worth emphasizing?

18:17Valentina D'Efilippo:How do you think about it? our next design thinkers event is happening in toronto on october 20th and 21st 2026 join us in person or watch live online from anywhere in the world with presentations hands-on workshops intimate discussions and opportunities to connect with the other 2 000 designers creative and art directors managers educators and students in attendance design thinkers toronto is a journey into the creative process and a celebration of strategic design thinking. Speakers include graphic designer and writer, Chip Kidd, lettering designer and author, Martina Floor, visual artist, Tammy Coker, information designer, Valentina DeFilippo, and best-selling author and artist, Adam J.

19:02Kurtz. Use the code PODCAST for 10 % off tickets. That's PODCAST, all lowercase, for 10 % off. Tickets for Design Thinkers in Toronto, both in person and live streaming, are on sale now at designthinkers.com.

19:19Valentina D'Efilippo:Such a good question. So just stepping back in just a kind of like context, data doesn't speak for itself. Why? Because first of all, data is not go send, even the way that we're kind of like researching whatever field and how we are constructing the data is human made, right? So even in the research part of the gathering, the harvesting the data, there are questions that carry biases. So even just in the generation of data, there are inherited bias, human bias. And then when it comes to then the kind of like exploration and explanation of the insights of the data, there are in every step of the way, how we're looking at it, how do we present it?

20:05Valentina D'Efilippo:What do we think is worth highlighting? What becomes secondary piece of information what maybe additional information do we bring to the table is all decided by us right the communicators the people in charge of the infographic or um uh or the data narrative so yeah huge responsibility that comes with that because data does carry this kind of like i suppose scientific or arrogant tone of like this is it we see it in the numbers this is the ultimate truth, but actually just bringing back the humanity of the data, how it was collected, what is there, but also what is missing, questioning, you know, the methodology in which it was initially gathered is all our responsibilities as communicators, as designers, as people that are actually looking at data to find solutions or to find answers.

21:03Valentina D'Efilippo:And especially these days, when it comes to a lot of the automation and a lot of like, let's just look at another data-driven system that is AI on top of maybe data. There is so much that we can miss the nuances if we kind of forget the responsibility that we have in terms of really digging through the data and through the numbers. And then the second part of the questions where you were asking me about what's my kind of like approach or the process how do i go from numbers into visuals it really depends because sometimes i don't even start with numbers sometimes i just start with the subject or with a big questions then we need to ask what type of data could we gather or what type of data is already available what might be missing also comes with just the normal questions that we ask in any sort of like design field of like who is the audience what is the message what is the ultimate goal right like what's the purpose of this piece of communication is there awareness do we want to sell more you know like there is always an agenda in any sort of like communication piece or activation there is a goal that we want to achieve so just this kind of like a basic understanding of the brief and contextual information of like who are we talking to are we speaking to kids or are we speaking to a more mature audience even that will change completely how we give data voice right?

22:29Yeah. How comfortable are they deciphering data, like speaks to how you have to label things or how complicated you can make a visualization?

22:37Valentina D'Efilippo:100%. What do they need to do with this data? What is the action they will take next? Will infer how do we visualize it, but also maybe what do we provide as ultimate output? And so the forms, they really kind of change depending on the medium, the objective, the goals of the communication. I really work in a kind of like format agnostic way. I go from dashboards and applications to experiential kind of installations, 3D forms, editorial and printed infographics. and so again i suppose like you you still follow the same kind of steps that any designers would do just kind of like understanding also the format and the channel and the kind of constraints that come with that but then to really give data voice i suppose there are two things that i always consider one is just like how do we go from a system that is not really human friendly numbers columns and rows and a lot of complexity into a system of patterns that can be just easily perceived by the human brain right so there is a lot of just understanding a visual perception pattern recognitions how the visual cortex functions to see scales magnitude how maybe some things stand out versus other things and then the other part is that visual communication from a kind of like storytelling point of view and semiotics right so it's not just the pattern recognition we want to show something is big something is small something is increasing something is decreasing but it's also like how are we talking about that so we're talking about bananas and kind of like simple terms right so what type of visual storytelling visual communication can we weave into the pattern recognitions to really communicate and to create a shortcut into the story and into the insights.

24:35Valentina D'Efilippo:And so then we're bringing in, obviously, graphic design, illustrations, maybe animation, maybe user experience and interaction, if there is, you know, like some sort of interaction built in. And then, obviously, something that we don't do enough, I suppose, in any field is the user testing, because it could work for us, but then if we fail to actually communicate to other people there is a lot of encoding and a lot of like decisions that we take as creators and often because you sit long enough with those decisions and with the data you just reach a level of comfort with the data and the science that you're visualizing that is kind of like you feel like everybody's gonna understand it because you become the expert of the data set you know like so yeah you're so steeped in it totally so stepping back and just asking somebody with fresh eyes before publishing the infographic before publishing the social media posts or maybe like running um the presentation to your clients just getting some fresh eyes so important um so user testing it can be like in kind of guerrilla style just ask somebody that maybe shares uh the studio with you or um your husband or your wife whoever your mom you know somebody that is actually you know, the familiar with the subject and maybe with the data, fresher eyes, just what do you read?

26:05Valentina D'Efilippo:What do you see? What stands out? Do you kind of like, are you able to navigate this? It's so funny because, well, because those are such basic design crit questions, right? As a design educator, those are the questions that I encourage students to ask each other or ask themselves when they're reviewing work, right? Even if you don't understand exactly what the work is in that moment, Like, what do you see? How does it make you feel? Say that stuff out loud. And let's see if that's what the designer wanted to communicate. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So important. With Infographic, actually, we managed to get the book tested with about three different classes, three different schools.

26:43Valentina D'Efilippo:So about 60 kids, which was really eye opening, I suppose. I've always been a fan of not oversimplifying complexity so I always teach because part of what I do is also teaching but there is this tendency of associating infographics or data visualization as a simplification of the data where I'm actually a big believer that it's more clarification what we're doing rather than simplification but with this specific project actually visualizing data for kids and being able to capture their attention so the brain can actually sustain the reading of a few pages rather than just one page and then like, okay, now my brain is fried.

27:26Valentina D'Efilippo:I'm going to move away. I need a break from this book. Actually, a big strategy was simplification. And a lot of the spreads, I thought that we had simplified enough. But then actually testing with kids was really eye-opening of just like things that we assumed they would understand. And kids were like, no idea. And so, yeah, like going back to the drawing boards and to even some of my, I suppose, like my best prides, the one that I was really fun and keen on and kind of having to rework them for the audience, which was super important. No one's better at asking questions than a seven year old.

28:12100%.

28:12Valentina D'Efilippo:Yeah. You said something there about like trying to help viewers, anyone looking at the data visualizations you work on, like really understand the magnitude of a situation or be able to humanize it in some way. And it really made me think about a recent project that jumped from an older project. So Poppy Field, which was a self-initiated project in 2014. Yeah. So it was actually one of the infographics for the book, but then I repurposed it and I created the interactive a year later. Yeah. Yeah. And for our listeners who might not be familiar with it, Poppy Field turns a century of wars into flowers.

28:51So stem length, bloom size, color, it all sort of carries real data. And the project, I actually have the sort of opening statement so listeners can really get a sense of it. So it opened with, the First World War was initially dubbed the war to end all wars. Sadly, the world has witnessed more than 200 conflicts in the 100 years since. Poppy Field reflects on the human cost of war from the beginning of the 20th century. So that was sort of your data set. And there was one stem that stood up and above the rest even 12 years ago. So you revisited a portion of that project, that stem that stood above the rest, late last year.

29:27You took the Instagram stories to mark two years since the October 7th attack that reignited the war against Palestine. You spent more than 16 hours like in absolute silence in the studio besides those moments where you did sort of pop on to Instagram stories and share with an audience live. And I know here in Canada, I was watching. We were sending clips around. It was sort of like a collective experience to watch you work through this. You made a single mark for each of the almost 35 ,000 lives lost at that point. All the children, women, journalists, medical workers, which was only roughly half of the total deaths recorded at that point.

30:05And I think today we're up over 73 ,000. But you painted that project by hand. You painted it live on the Internet and totally alone. It was devastating to watch you do that, like even the physical toll on your body to do that. But it really did, I think, help lots of people understand the magnitude of that, the absolute magnitude of it. Talk to me about the value of like personifying data, I guess, like really trying to sort of bring human emotion into those data sets. Because a lot of the work you do revolves around like humans, people that have experienced things.