Blog Archives

The Sanremo Music Festival is a major mundane event in Italy since the 1950s. Every year, soon after the Christmas break is over, new singers and old chanteurs gather in Sanremo, for a week-long competition.

The visual language of old data visualization always amazed me: being able to represent complex data with a few elements and colors, and yet making it readable, is an exciting challenge.

How can we create beautiful charts? Replicate the best!

Most of the chart libraries expect the coder to declare the data for the entire chart. The paper A layered grammar of graphics states:

The first chart library I used (almost 15 years ago) was jpgraph for PHP, then after too much customization of its code, I decided it was time to create my library. I did it with ActionScript and Flash, it was called Atomicharts, it was doing few things: line charts, area charts, and bar charts. I truly enjoyed the experience of putting together the library.

At chrt we are always very excited 👯 when we create new charts 📊. We love neat and crisp 🤓 charts 📈.

When I used Scratch with my daughter, I noticed how intuitive is thinking in blocks (and nested blocks), and I wondered why we were not building charts similarly with javascript. It was fun and it helped to ideate through one of the most natural process: addition.