We want to enable everyone to create beautiful charts, maps, and tables. New to data visualization? Or do you have specific questions about us? You'll find all the answers here.
The Datawrapper Blog is a blog written by a bunch of people who work on Datawrapper. We love data visualizations, 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, maps, and tables. 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 visualizes data. Yes, we mention Datawrapper as an example quite often. And you see many visualizations on 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 categories like Data Vis Do’s and Don’ts 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 Charlotte Rost. Her job is to take care of this 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 writing a guest post sounds interesting to you, get in touch with Lisa at lisa@datawrapper.de and she’ll be happy to help you get your thoughts out. We won’t publish guest posts that exist to promote your platform/product, so please don’t bother getting in touch.
These are all the people who have written so far on our blog (or will do so in the future!):
Lisa Charlotte Muth (@lisacmuth, formerly Lisa Charlotte Rost) is responsible for the communication at Datawrapper, especially the blog. She’s been writing about data vis for years and is excited to learn and teach.
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.
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 keeps the office fridge filled.
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.
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 Operational Manager responsible for human resources, accounting, and information security. When she is not managing our office, she works as a coach to help people find solutions to their individual problems and gives workshops on self and time management.
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.
Rose Mintzer-Sweeney(@rosemintzers) writes for the blog at Datawrapper. She’s here to talk data vis, tell stories, and tweak punctuation. The rest of the time, you can find her exploring new cities and googling the etymology of every word you say. Drop her a line at rose@datawrapper.de.
Aya Tanikawa (@ayatnkw) is a support engineer at Datawrapper. 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.
Edurne Morillo(@EdurneMG) is a support engineer at Datawrapper. A data journalist in training, she enjoys writing data stories and helping users and newsrooms to create compelling visualisations. When not at work, you can find her traveling and taking analog pictures. Get in touch with her at support@datawrapper.de.
Rebecca Mary Peake is a junior software developer at Datawrapper. She developed a passion for data visualization while earning her master’s degree in theoretical physics in the U.K. When she’s not programming, Rebecca enjoys cold water swimming in the lakes around Berlin.
Marten Sigwart (@martensigwart) is a software engineer working on the Datawrapper app across the stack. Outside of Datawrapper, you’ll probably find him either working on one of his side projects or out and about exploring Berlin, playing football, and enjoying the sun.
John McCall was our summer intern in 2019. Originally from the US, he is currently doing a Master’s of Science in Cartography and Geovisualization at the Technical Universities of Munich, Vienna, and Dresden. While writing his thesis, he helps us in our efforts to create a tool that more people all over the world can use.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Click here to sign up to our newsletters.
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