It’s Day 5 of Dashboard week! It sure has been an intense week but I do feel like I’ve learnt so much and been pushed right out of my comfort zone which is something I’ve been after for the last few weeks.

Today’s challenge looked at data from the internet boyband database gathered by Billboard.com – you can see the link to our challenge here.

The rules were pretty simple: clean and prep the data if required, add on supplementary data as we wish and visualize. A much more simple task compared to the rest of the week but the topic of Music isn’t one that comes so naturally to me.

The data went back 30 years and after scouring the Billboard website, I found their list of the 30 best boyband albums over the past 30 years and a certain One Direction came out on top. You can see the article here. Therefore I decided that I would make One Direction the focus of my dashboard. Design and aesthetics don’t come naturally to me but I challenged myself to be more creative with this project and produce more of an aesthetic infographic dashboard as opposed to an exploratory analytical dashboard.

The prep of the data was pretty simple. There were 2 files which could be joined on the band name, I then filtered to just give me just the band One Direction, removed some fields, created some new fields and uploaded the table to snowflake (blog on how to push from Alteryx to Snowflake is to come).

I did also create an excel with some supplementary data for each of the band members. It looked like this and I joined it to my Alteryx prepped data in Tableau:

My Dashboard idea was to give a few facts about one direction but then also about each member individually to showcase how they have got on since the band split up in 2015.

On the Database website, there are cool little images of each of the members and I wanted to use these. However, since the characters were animating on screen, I couldn’t do a simple web-scrape to download them as images. What I decided to do instead was to take a screenshot using the snipping tool and upload it into photoshop which I managed to get a 7 day free trial of. I won’t go into the photoshop process but I was able to quickly cut around each member to remove the background and produce neat images that I could use as a filter action on my dashboard.

I also planned to size them by their height and since tableau sizes from the middle of an image, the sizing will be wrong. The shapes will resize, but the feet of the individuals won’t align. This useful tutorial from Andy Kriebel helped me out in this situation.

Here is my final dashboard! The colours align with the boyband database website, hence the brightness – enjoy!