Our top 5 Flourish tips for gorgeous data visualizations
Flourish is a powerful data visualization tool that helps analysts and content creators produce effective visualizations for all devices. And since Flourish runs in your browser, you don’t need a souped-up laptop to use it.A good Chromebookis more than enough to run the application. It’s also a tool that, likeGoogle Pinpoint, is useful for journalists. However, not all of the tool’s features are immediately apparent. So, here’s a list of tips and tricks to help you get the most out of this versatile tool.
Use annotations to focus on specific data
Flourish can automatically label your visualizations based on the existing labels inside your data. However, that doesn’t always tell the whole story you’re trying to get across. Use Flourish’s annotations tool to mark, label, and connect the points you want to highlight or explain in your visualization.
Annotations can be found when creating a story using a line, bar, pie, scatter, or 3D map template. Follow these steps:
Advanced options allow for greater customization options, including marker type, connector type, and more. you may edit each annotation’s style and choose to show it on individual screen sizes.
Use the viewport or projection settings to localize map templates
Flourish has several map templates that are useful for geographical visualizations. Most of these templates have a broad focus, showing things on a national, continental, or global scale. This can be frustrating if you want to visualize something focused on a smaller region.
Global map templates can be adjusted to focus on local areas. By editing a template’s viewport and zoom settings (or its projection settings if you use a projection map), any map template can be customized to feature a local area, ignoring the wider map for which the template was designed.
Here’s how to achieve this on a map that uses viewports:
Here’s how to achieve the same effect on a projection map:
Your map now only shows the part of the world that you want your visualization to focus on.
Check how your visualizations look on multiple screen sizes
Responsive design is the name of the game. To help with this, Flourish automatically adjusts your visualizations based on screen size. That doesn’t mean every visualization immediately looks good, though.
Flourish has tools that let you check how your data looks on multiple screen sizes. On the preview screen, you can preview how your data looks on your current screen, a typical tablet, and a typical mobile phone.
If your visualization doesn’t work on one or more devices, adjust the size, look, and layout of the elements using the menu to the right. Experiment with the settings to find a look that fits your preferences.
Add time sliders to animate visualizations
Flourish has some visualizations that animate by default, such as chart races, which show the change in data over long periods. These aren’t the only types of charts that can show changes over time. Flourish’s time slider feature can be added to many visualizations, including scatter plots, maps, line charts, bar charts, and pie charts.
As a general rule, when you have data that shows change over time, add a time slider to visualize that change using an animation. you could choose how quickly you want the chart to animate and what type of control viewers have over the animations.
Use custom code to unlock more of Flourish’s potential
One of Flourish’s selling points is that you don’t need to know any coding or markup language to create an effective chart. However, knowing how to code unlocks a previously unseen side of Flourish’s potential. Sometimes, you might need more granular control over your charts than the existing options allow. Depending on what you hope to accomplish, Flourish’s compatibility with HTML5 might give you the results you need.
it’s possible to add code to a header or footer with these steps:
The text boxes allow you to insert custom code similar to how you add it to an HTML document. The code can be in-line or within individual tags. This gives you a range of powerful options. you may make changes as simple as altering the text color or as drastic as adding event triggers and custom animations. You can also add code to an annotation or popup in much the same way.
More ways to make maps
Flourish’s mapping capabilities are robust, and a few tools can better display data geographically. Still, you may need a more specialized tool for map creation. Google Maps is the perfect app for many map-related uses. For more information, check out our list oftips and tricks for Google Maps.
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