Renewable Energy in the US Creative Data Visualization

I attempted to follow along with Federica's design but using the same data from the 50 United States of America. This sounded much easier than it turned out to be. Overall, the result feels rewarding (although I already see so many issues I'd go back and fix if I could do it over) but I experienced the most challenges in the data wrangling phase and in the fine-tune editing phases.

DATA PHASE CHALLENGES:
1. I realized that the data I could find for individual united states of america did not match the World in Data categories, so I ended up doing a bunch of formulas and calculations in google sheets to get something close to what the tutorial showed. I hope my calculations are correct:)
2. The scale was very different for the US vs the rest of the world. I learned that the US includes biofuels like burning wood as a "renewable resource" and none of the states have a share of renewables more than 50%...so the numbers are very different from the global numbers. Basically, the US is way behind.

DESIGN CHALLENGES:
1. I chose to add a level of regional data. I like it, although it did create another layer of complexity that maybe wasn't needed.
2. In the design of the per capita motifs, I didn't have any numbers higher than 66 (again...the US is so behind the rest of the world) so I wanted a slightly simpler motif. I went through several iterations of the wheel and spoke to replicate a "clock-like" shape. I like it ok, but wish I had simplifed it even further.
3. I ranked the states in ascending order which had consequences down the line when I was trying to add text. Oops.
4. Not a challenge, but I LOVED learning about the pie chart trick for making the population bubbles! So cool.

FINE TUNING CHALLENGES:
1. My overall takeaway here is to take Federica's advice and make copies of all the elements early on and DON'T erase them until the end (my bad). At some point in tweaking the per capita clock motifs, I lost the variation in stroke that I had so carefully added for ease of visibility. I didn't realize I'd lost it until too late and couldn't recover an earlier version.
2. When I went to adjust the "bar graph" share of renewables lines to make them thinner, they were ungrouped. But every time I tried to apply the transformation (horizontal scale) it acted like they were grouped and tried to scrunch them all up. It's strange because I was just following the tutorial and it worked the first time, so I must have done something to the lines that made it impossible to transform later. I found an article that describes the same issue and a hack to get around it, but I might add this into the help forum to see if anyone else has advice.

I learned SO much following along with this (not just about design but also about the topic of energy) and am really inspired to get started on another with a topic I'm more familiar with. Thank you, Federica!!!