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Love Data Week 2025

Event details and data visualization contest guidelines for Love Data Week 2025 hosted by the library Catalyst team.

Data Viz Contest

Student data wizards unite! ‍🧙‍
We challenge you to impress our judges with your skills and creativity!

Data visualization is the translation of data into a visual medium such as a map, chart, infographic, 3D-model, or even art. It's also a fun, creative, and effective way to communicate complex ideas through shape, color, size, intensity, and more. Captivate us with your visuals, tell a compelling story, tackle real-world problems, build skills, and have fun.

Judges look for creativity, clarity, and visual interest when judging entries.

Entrants are encouraged to attend the library's Love Data Week workshops on effective design and picking a chart to help them achieve their highest score.

Prizes

The contest offers three cash prizes distributed as Visa gift cards:

  • First: $150
  • Second: $75
  • Third: $50

Winners will be invited to luncheon on March 26 to collect their prize and celebrate their success. 

Submission Instructions

Submissions are closed for 2025.

Contest Details

The contest opens on Friday, February 14th and closes at midnight on March 14th.

Rules and Guidelines

  • Only Iowa State students – undergraduate and graduate – are eligible to participate in the contest. 
  • All entries must be your original work
    • You may submit visualizations that have been previously published within the past 12-months or that you plan to use in a future publication or thesis or dissertation. 
    • You may submit data visualizations created for a class as long as they were created after Feb 14, 2024. 
  • You must have permission to use and share the data used in your visualization
    • Reusing public data is encouraged! Please submit a citation and link to the data source with your submission.
    • If using data from a research project please get permission from your supervisor or major professor before submitting.
  • Collaborative and team entries are welcome but you may only submit one entry
    • If your name is on more than one entry, the second entry will be disqualified
  • Only one visualization per submission
    • If your visualization contains multiple datasets or visuals, you must choose one for us to judge.  
  • Your entry must be submitted as one of the following:
    • Image file: TIFF, PNG, or SVG file
    • Video file: MPEG-4, AVI or MOV file
    • Interactive/online: a link to a live webpage that does not require a login or account creation.
      • Ex: Tableau files will not be accepted but a link to a Tableau Public visualization will be accepted. 
    • If you wish to use a file type not on this list please contact Megan (mno@iastate.edu) with details before submitting. 
  • AI-generated entries are not allowed
    • We want to see your best work and skills. 

Data Resources

New to data visualization? Looking for data to illustrate? We’ve got you.  

Get Inspiration 

  • Information is beautiful awards from the Data Visualization Society 
  • Information is beautiful - no affiliation with the link above - was founded by a bestselling author of infographic books, this website has lots of examples and “juicy” datasets you can use for this and other projects.  
  • reddit.com/r/DataIsBeautiful is an online community dedicated sharing and celebrating beautiful and useful data visualizations.  
  • Makeover Monday a global initiative by Tableau to encourage creating and reimagining data visualizations
  • The Pudding publishes visual essays backed by data and has received multiple awards from the Data Visualization Society.

Find Datasets 

Not sure where to go to look for data? Here are some great places to start!

There are datasets for EVERYTHING!

Here are a few of our personal favorites:

Questions

Contact Erin Ridnour, emanders@iastate.edu or Megan O'Donnell, mno@iastate.edu