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 Dispatch, 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, maps, and tables. To create a visualization, you paste in your numbers and choose a visualization type. We make sure that the visualization 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 our communications team: Lisa, Rose, and Veronika. Their 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, especially in the Weekly Charts category.
We also feature articles written by our users on our blog. If writing a guest post sounds interesting to you, get in touch with us at blog@datawrapper.de and we’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 with that.
These are all the people who have written on our blog so far, including past employees and guest authors. If you’re curious about who works at Datawrapper right now, visit our About Us page on datawrapper.de.
Lisa Charlotte Muth (she/her, @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.
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.
Veronika Halamková (she/her, @v_halamkova) is a data vis writer in the Communications team. She lives in Berlin and is here to create and write about beautiful data visualizations. Before Datawrapper, she worked in the data team at Tortoise Media. Say hi at veronika@datawrapper.de.
Gregor Aisch (he/him, vis.social/@gka) is Co-founder and Head of Data Visualization 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.
Simon Jockers (he/him, @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 (she/her) 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 is a software engineer at Datawrapper. He makes sure our PDF and SVG export produces high quality results. He also makes conceptual art and never stops being excited that the world exists.
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.
Pascal Bürkle (he/him, @pabueco) is a full-stack developer working on various aspects of the Datawrapper app. In his spare time, he loves exploring random ideas, starting way too many side projects, and playing all kinds of video games. You can see more of his work at his website pabue.co.
Marten Sigwart (he/him, @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.
Livnah is our office manager who takes care of all the needs in our office as well as the patio and garden; and most importantly makes sure the snack drawer is always filled up.
Elliot Bentley (he/him, @elliot_bentley) is a senior data visualisation developer at Datawrapper, based in London. He previously worked on interactive graphics and internal tools at The Wall Street Journal and created the popular web app oTranscribe. Outside of work, Elliot likes to make his own video games.
Shaylee Safie (she/her) joined Datawrapper’s support team in 2022, after she visited Berlin one time and immediately knew she needed to move here. Outside of work, you can find her knitting, listening to podcasts, or exploring the city. If you’re trying to get a tricky data set to behave in Datawrapper, she’d love to help at support@datawrapper.de.
Lucas “Doce” Fernandes (@doceazedo911) is a curiosity-driven developer, a Svelte evangelist, and a live coder from Brazil. When not smashing bugs and building new features for Datawrapper, he likes to livestream his coding sessions and listen to some of the vinyl records he collects.
Inga Lev (she/her) is a backend developer who joined Datawrapper in 2022 and cares deeply about quality. She lives in Berlin with her wife and their cat. When she is not at work or tired (which has been quite rare in recent years), she is hiking or meeting friends.
Edurne Morillo(@EdurneMG) was a support engineer at Datawrapper until 2022. A data journalist in training, she enjoyed writing data stories and helping users and newsrooms to create compelling visualizations. When not at work, you can find her traveling and taking analog pictures.
Gustav Neustadt (he/him, @gustavneustadt@vis.social) is a student of interface design and design intern at Datawrapper. He studies and lives in Potsdam with his partner and their three kids. Gustav has a passion for good software and especially great type design. You can see more from Gustav on his website, gustavneustadt.de.
Hans Hack(@hnshck) was a front end developer at Datawrapper from 2018 until 2022. He worked mostly on our locator maps. He’s now a freelancer focussing on maps and working in Berlin.
John McCall worked on support, sales, and trainings until 2022. John gets excited about maps and is always looking for new and unique ways to visualize geographic data!
Rebecca Mary Peake was 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 wasn’t programming, Rebecca enjoyed cold water swimming in the lakes around Berlin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 blog@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 licenseand you can reuse and translate them as long they stay digital. Do get in touch with us at blog@datawrapper.de 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 us know about your translation so that we 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 three newsletters, one for Datawrapper News, one for all blog posts except Weekly Charts, and one for all Weekly Charts. Click here to sign up to our newsletters.
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