Chartable is a blog written by a bunch of people who work on Datawrapper. We love charts, and we created this place to talk about them.
The mission of this blog is to teach you how to better visualize data. Sometimes, we’ll learn with you; answering questions that both you and we might have. We will experiment with charts. And since data vis is a field with different approaches, we will tell you our opinions and invite you to disagree.
This blog is for everyone who creates charts. Yes, we mention Datawrapper as an example quite often. And you see many charts one this blog that are created with our tool. For example, our articles in “Datawrapper News” are about new features and probably mostly interesting for you if you’re a Datawrapper user. But even if you don’t use our tool, we hope that the articles in “Thoughts & How To’s” and our Weekly Charts are helpful for you.
What’s Datawrapper?
Datawrapper is a tool we built to make it easy for journalists and other communicators to create simple charts and maps for web articles. To make a chart, you paste in your numbers and choose a chart type. We make sure that the chart you’ll embed in your article at the end is beautiful, responsive and interactive.
You can learn more about Datawrapper on our website: datawrapper.de
Who’s writing on this blog?
Most of our articles are written by Lisa, who we hired to specifically take care of the blog. However, we want everyone who works at Datawrapper to share their thought. So you will find articles from all of us. We also want to feature more articles written by our users on our blog. If that sounds interesting to you, get in touch with Lisa at lisa@datawrapper.de and she’ll be happy to discuss the process with you further.
These are all the people who have written so far on our blog (or will do so in the future!):
Lisa Charlotte Rost (@lisacrost) is responsible for the design and the blog at Datawrapper. She's been
writing and talking about data vis for a few years now. Based in Berlin, she organizes the Data Vis meetup there. Lisa likes emails, so write her at lisa@datawrapper.de.
Gregor Aisch (@driven_by_data) is CTO at Datawrapper. He started working on Datawrapper in 2012 and spent four years
making graphics at The New York Times. Gregor lives in Berlin.
Mirko Lorenz (@mirkolorenz) is Chairman of the Board. Before that, he served as CEO and later Co-CEO of the company for almost 10 years until 2019. His focus today is long-term strategy, working closely with the management team.
Elana Levin Schtulberg (@elanaEllesce) takes care of our user support. She's here to answer all your Datawrapper questions, help, teach and advise. Elana is into design and coding and recently started making some of her own interactive visualisations. She’s keen to try and fix any bugs you find on her own.
David Kokkelink (@DavidKokkelink) is the CEO of Datawrapper, with a focus on daily operations and sales. As such, he works directly with users, visits customers from time to time and tries to keep the office fridge filled.
Ivan Lokhov (@ilokhov) is a developer at Datawrapper, with a focus on front end engineering. He works on various aspects of Datawrapper and enjoys creating
his own visualisations by combining his front end knowledge with passion for good design.
Anna Thieme is a basemap creator at Datawrapper, creating and updating maps for our mapping tool. When she's not digging into shapefiles, TopoJSONs, qGis and mapshaper, she's running her own catering company in Berlin. You need a map? Get in touch with her at
support@datawrapper.de.
Hendrik Bartusch (@eXo_X5) is a backend developer at Datawrapper. Since he believes that only code that you wrote yourself, is code you truly understand (which is important for maintenance and debugging), he is often coding until late in the night until something is really DONE.
Hans Hack (@hnshck) is a front end developer at Datawrapper. He started working at Datawrapper in 2018 and spent the last years working in the field of data visualization with a strong focus on maps. Hans lives in Berlin.
Fabian Gündel (@sto3psl) is a software engineer at Datawrapper, creating the “building blocks” for visualizations. He also takes care of customer needs and likes to talk about UI development. Outside of work he reads comic books, rides his longboard and plays beach volleyball.
Simon Jockers (@sjockers) is a software engineer at Datawrapper, where he contributes to the chart editor and to chart types. Outside of Datawrapper, he helps organizing the Berlin
Hacks/Hackers meetup and works on way too many
side projects.
Daniela Haake is the office manager at Datawrapper. She’s responsible for the administrative side and everything organizational – from talking to our tax accountant to planning business trips. When she’s not managing our office, Daniela coaches people to organize themselves and their businesses.
Jakub Valenta (@kuba100) is a software engineer at Datawrapper. He makes sure our PDF and SVG export produces high quality results. He is also making
conceptual art and never stops being excited that the world exists.
Aya Tanikawa is our current writer and support intern. She answers user requests, writes Academy articles and enjoys solving problems with and for our users. When not at work, you can find her taking long walks in the woods. Get in touch with her with all your questions at
support@datawrapper.de.
Defne Altiok (@AltiokDefne) is a journalist with Deutsche Welle's traineeship programme. She was spending a month in spring 2019 as our intern to learn more about creating simple, effective and shareable visuals as a data journalist.
John McCall was our summer intern in 2019. He is currently doing a Master’s of Science in Cartography and Geovisualization at the Technical Universities of Munich, Vienna, and Dresden. With a passion for all things data- and map-related, he was working with the Datawrapper team on making beautiful charts and maps.
Zara Khan (@zara_k01) was our marketing and user support intern in winter 2019/2020. She divided her time between answering user requests and applying creative digital marketing practices at Datawrapper. When not at work, she occasionally volunteers for non-profits or is busy doing street photography.
Christoph Wolf is our first guest author! He's doing data stuff & infographics along with sports coverage as editor for the website of n-tv, a German news TV channel. He first heard of Datawrapper in 2012 – and has been a fan ever since.
Benedict Witzenberger (@munichrocker) is a data journalist at Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s leading daily. He cares a lot about making data accessible and digging deep into big datasets to find exiting stories for his readers. And he loves to make stories shine – with great visuals. You can learn more about him on
his website.
Sergio Sánchez (@tacosdedatos) is a computational social scientist and public policy researcher in California. He is very passionate about the democratization of cutting-edge knowledge of all things data and data viz. You can learn more about him on his website
tacosdedatos.com.
Simon Haas (@simondhaas) is a data journalist at the German public-service television broadcaster ZDF in Mainz. Before that, he was a Google Fellow at the graphics team at Berliner Morgenpost. He likes coffee, Wagner and horses. Find out more about him on his website
simonhaas.de.
I want to get in touch with you!
You found a mistake? You want us to write about a certain topic? You disagree strongly with one of our articles, and want to make sure we know why? Please get in touch with us! We’re always happy to hear from you:
- If you have ideas, questions or comments regarding the blog, write to lisa@datawrapper.de.
- If you have technical questions about Datawrapper, let us know at support@datawrapper.de. David or Elana will reply.
- If you prefer Twitter, tweet at us @datawrapper or write us a Direct Message (our DMs are open).
Can I reuse or translate the content on your blog?
Yes. Our blog posts are under the CC BY-SA license and you can reuse and translate them as long they stay digital. Do get in touch with Lisa to check if we’re ok to see our content in your printed matter.
That means that you can publish our articles on your site, show our images in your presentations and even make money with our content – as long as you give as credit, link to our original blog post & let your audience know if you made changes to our material. These changes need to be shared under a CC BY-SA license as well.
We’re also very happy to see translations of our blog posts. Let Lisa know about your translation so that she can link to it in the original blog post.
I want to know about your newest things!
Sweet! We’re more than happy to keep you updated. We have two newsletters: One for news about Datawrapper features. (That’s a great one if you’re a Datawrapper user.) We also have a newsletter for our Weekly Charts. If you sign up for that, you’ll get a newsletter every week. Sign up here: