I recently sat down with Payal Chugh Vaidya on Design Etc. and chatted for ninety minutes. About data viz, career, cooking, crying over spreadsheets. Here are some highlights from the conversation.

The classroom where it clicked. I have two degrees in journalism and none in design. At Columbia, I took a class called Interactive Design and Storytelling. Batch of 250. Class of 20. In that first session, I thought: this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I am the only person from that class who does this professionally today.

Not being a great writer. At 21, surrounded by fantastic feature writers, I realized writing was not my skill set. So I asked: if I do not have that skill, how do I bridge my reporting to another tool for communication? That question led me to data viz.

White man confidence. First month at Columbia, I felt dumb in classrooms. My peers spoke with conviction. Then I started listening, and realized there was not always much substance. As an Indian woman, you are trained to think twice before you open your mouth. Learning to unlearn that, to express yourself with confidence, was one of the best things that could have happened to me at that age.

Spreadsheets can make you cry. I was on the Reuters COVID tracker from day one. I never thought I could cry while filling cells in a spreadsheet. Watching the same curve move from Milan to New York to Delhi. I coped by telling myself: my job is to make sure there is good, reliable information out in the world. Eventually I stopped feeling anything. COVID burnt me out. I came back to India not knowing what to do next.

Function before form. People make charts without knowing the insight themselves. Statewide data? Let’s make a map. Why? No reason. Everything looks the same. The process should be: figure out the point you need to make, then think about what someone will do with that point, and only then pick the visual. The moment you phrase something as an insight, it stops being a data dump and starts being about action.

People remember people, not numbers. At my first data reporting job, I asked a senior editor who had been doing this for two decades: any tips? He said, the best data stories have the least amount of numbers. Because people don’t remember numbers. People remember people.

Obsession. People ask me, as someone who did not study coding, how did I become a coder? I tell them I did not sleep for two years. That is not a flex. That is just what obsession looks like when you are 23 and you have found the thing you are most passionate about.

The full conversation includes the Delhi pollution project, the Bollywood female solo decline story, narrative structures for data storytelling, why information design is a different domain, and why data experience is different from UX.