A retrospective of 15 years of data visualization projects

Hi, this is Gregor, co-founder of Datawrapper. For this Weekly Chart, I will analyze the visualizations I’ve created since 2009.

In May, I did a crazy thing and started a new job at ZEIT ONLINE! My heart is still with Datawrapper, and I’m continuing to support its future in an advisory capacity. But I had missed visualizing data and trying out new things myself, so I’m very happy with my new role.

This week, I had a few days off from my new job and took some time to update my portfolio website. It brought back good memories of the many things I’ve done over the years, so I got curious and started to collect metadata about all the projects I’ve listed on my site.

So what can we see here? The most unsurprising fact is that I create more visualizations when I’m not busy working on Datawrapper. Another thing I sort of already knew is that 2016 was my peak year in terms of visualization output!

I seem to favor charts more than maps, and during my years at The New York Times I also grew more fond of tables. Counting these charts wasn’t easy! How do you count a page with 100 bump charts, or one with 20+ treemaps? To simplify things for this article, I just counted projects using at least one chart, map, or table.

For the next chart, I classified the visualizations into static, interactive, and animated. I used this definition: something is interactive if the user can change something about the visualization itself. A tooltip alone doesn't change the visualization (it’s just added on top), but a search filter does (since it hides/fades elements). Animated projects are those where the visualization changes without the user doing anything active (besides perhaps hitting a “play” button).

We can see that most of my visualizations were static, but interactive visualizations aren’t dead yet. I definitely lacked the time for interactive graphics while working on Datawrapper, though!

These definitions aren’t perfect, and I think the data would change if I had to reclassify my projects. For instance, how would you count an animated view transition in a "scrollytelling" article?

Finally, let’s get even messier with a table of the chart and map types I’ve used in my projects:

According to this analysis, line charts are my number one favorite chart type (which makes sense to me), followed by choropleth maps. And yes, I do enjoy making small multiple charts. But you also see weirder stuff in the top 10, like heatmaps and treemaps.

One thing that surprised me was that locator maps rank so low. In no way have I created only seven locator maps over the past 15 years! I guess not all my locator maps made it into the portfolio.

What's missing in these charts is the “fanciness” factor. A simple line chart is less fancy than, say, an animated 3d area chart, or a polar lollipop chart. But I will leave this analysis for another time!

Chart choices

Why did I use streamgraphs for the visualizations above? First of all, I like them! They’re kind of the less-ugly sibling of stacked area charts, where the zero baseline is shifted based on some magic wiggle-reducing algorithm.

But it’s not just about aesthetics: Streamgraphs also try to fix the notorious “I can only really read the bottom category” problem that all stacked area charts have.

To create streamgraphs in Datawrapper, I just added an invisible area at the bottom to offset the visible areas. I used the d3.stackOffsetWiggle function to compute the offset values!

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That’s it for this week. Next week, you’ll probably hear something more scary from my colleague Elliot.