Which chart types did our users create in 2020?

Hi, this is Lisa, responsible for the blog & communication at Datawrapper. This Weekly Chart follows a tradition: I’ll look back at what you have created in 2020.

What a year! Because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the U.S. election, data visualization got more important than ever before. You were busy informing the public (Thank you!), with charts and maps, and tables. Here are three charts that show how we experienced 2020.

Chart views

We’ve never seen as many visualizations views as we’ve seen in the past months. You placed Datawrapper charts, maps, and tables on the home pages of your news sites, and it showed:

Good thing we can handle such a load: Datawrapper served ten times the chart views Tableau Public reported, without any downtime.

Chart types

You created more visualizations, too, clicking the “Publish” button on almost half a million visualizations. That’s two times more visualizations than last year; four times more than in 2017.

Let’s see (as we did in 2017, 2018 and 2019) the breakdown of the visualization types you published:

Keep in mind that these are relative numbers, not absolute ones. For example, the share of published locator maps decreased, but our users published 60% more locator maps than last year.

In fact, every fifth Datawrapper visualization that got published this year was some kind of map; more than ever before.

Live-updating visualizations

2020 wasn’t just the year of data visualization; it was the year of live-updating data visualizations. The number of published charts doubled, but the number of live-updating charts, maps, and tables increased fourfold compared to last year. An astonishing 150.000 visualizations you published this year were (or still are!) live-updating.

A busy year

We’re proud every time our tool helps you to inform your audience. To make this easier, we added lots of new features this year: A big choropleth & symbol map update, better annotations, heatmaps for tables, and much more. Our CTO Gregor will explain what we achieved in 2020 and our roadmap in another article soon.

We also try to support you in your data vis needs on this very blog. This year – besides 53 Weekly Charts and other smaller articles –, we published

• training materials you can use to teach Datawrapper,
• COVID-19 and U.S. election visualizations for you to reuse,
• and explained how to improve the colors you use in your charts and maps.

We also added lots of new articles to our Academy: There are now more than 200 articles helping you make the most out of Datawrapper.

Our team got better, too. We’re super happy that we could welcome David Wendler, our new Head of Design. To answer your questions faster, we also grew our support team with Aya and Edurne (Eddie) Morillo, who both started as our interns. We’re now 15 people – and we’re very excited for 2021.

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We hope you all had the best possible 2020. Here’s to a better 2021! We’ll see you next week with a fresh Weekly Chart.