Hi! I'm Julie, a designer living near Joshua Tree, California.
My design career began, apparently, at the age of 13 with the hand-drawn type samples below. My love of typography has not waned, though my taste in fonts has changed.
I have been doing graphic design for almost half my life. But then something magical happened in 2022. I discovered data visualization and my brain went into overdrive. I could barely control the avalanche of ideas. So I started creating information visuals in every spare second I had.
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It's now mid-2024 and I've created almost 50 deeply-researched infographics, quit my dead-end packaging job, won a data design contest, spoke at a dataviz webinar, and became one of the top contributors to Voronoi, an infographic app with a daily feed of data.
I was a panel speaker at the Visual Capitalist "Creator Con 2023," a webinar with the theme of "Mobilizing the Future of Data Storytelling" which took place 16 June 2023.
A bit of backstory
Working in my home office amongst the desert landscape is my dream job, but the road to get here was long and full of twists. My formal education is a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, but I am self-taught in design. I started out as a print production artist for punk bands doing 7" records in the late '90's. Then I moved on to freelancing for a mixed bag of clients via MacPeople in the Bay Area of northern California and landed a position at an ad agency in San Francisco. I continued to build my skills freelancing at corporate firms, agencies and small design boutiques around Los Angeles until I became a junior designer at the Screen Actors Guild.
But the 9-5 just wasn't for me.
So I started a company called The Particle Zoo making hand-sewed subatomic particle plush toys. Working as a solopreneur for 10 years taught me a lot: how to wear all the hats, how to run a small business and... particle physics. While the particle physics might not help me now, I realized that being my own boss was the only way to go.
And because I've had the entrepreneurial spirit all my life, in 2023 I started Julie Peasley Design to help people crystallize their data stories and turn numbers and statistics into engaging visuals.
If you are curious, check out some passion projects I have designed and self-published. I have a special interest in mathematics, science and aviation. STEM education and literacy for everyone is important to me.
To see my entire timeline of projects in 2023, check out this 76-second video reel.
Watch "Behind the Viz", where Tableau champion Will Sutton interviews me about my award-winning graphic "Where Does the US Import its Food From?"
The LA Weekly featured me in their "Most Exciting People of 2015" issue.
I've always had one foot in art, one foot in science. Using these two sides of the brain makes me uniquely qualified for the design niche that makes me happiest: data visualization and infographics. It also helps to be ridiculously curious about the world and obsessively meticulous about details. Each infographic is a puzzle. No two are the same. I find joy in the challenge of making the data beautiful, uncovering insights, or unpacking a confusing topic.
The amount of data in the world today is staggering. I really believe I'm the perfect person for the job to help the world make sense of it through visual design. I like decluttering the chaos. So I take data visualization to be my wedded design niche. I will honor it all the days of my life... as long as we are working with good data (and a whole lot of coffee)...
I am not usually a big fan of personal data visualizations. At the risk of being self-indulgent, I created a personal infographic timeline all my addresses in the graphic below. It all started with a list my mother emailed me 20 years ago. Once the addresses were in, I was inspired to create more life categories. If you zoom up, you will know a lot more about me than I am normally comfortable with, but this is life. It happened. It's the facts. I trust the source 😎
