About Us

Uncharted 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.

On this blog, we will tell you how to make better charts. 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 few rules and 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. Our articles in “Datawrapper News” are about new features and only 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 content-creators 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?

We are seven people (plus one or two freelancers) working on Datawrapper, and some of us have written on this blog at some point: Gregor mostly at the beginning, before he went to work at the NYT (he’s back now, so sometimes he writes for this blog as well). Then David joined and took care of most of the map functionality, and the blog posts about them. As a co-founder, Mirko was there from the beginning and has been writing a few articles in-between. And in November 2017, we hired Lisa specifically to take care of the blog, so the blog is filling up nicely since then.

This is us:

David Kokkelink (@DavidKokkelink) is the co-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.

Mirko Lorenz (@mirkolorenz) is the co-CEO of Datawrapper, with a focus on long term strategy and finance. He started Datawrapper as a project in 2012. The motivation at that time: Make it simpler for a journalist to create and publish a quality chart. For the last five years he has been active as a trainer for data-driven journalism.

Gregor Aisch (@driven_by_data) is CTO and lead developer at Datawrapper. He started working on Datawrapper in 2012 and spent the last four years making graphics at The New York Times. Gregor lives in Berlin.

Lisa Charlotte Rost (@lisacrost) is a designer 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 and enjoys the few sunny days there. Lisa likes emails, so write her at [email protected]

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 [email protected].

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.

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 [email protected].
• If you have technical questions about Datawrapper, let us know at [email protected]. David or Mirko 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. Attention: If you sign up for that, you’ll get a newsletter every week. That’s every seven days. That’s a lot. Think you can handle that? Then sign up here: