3 Flourish
Beginning Documents
Create a Flourish account. Start here.
Create your first visualization instructions. Click here.
Starting Off with Alberto Cairo. A Video on Getting Rolling:
If you like Alberto (who doesn’t?), then check out his YouTube page for more great content: Alberto Cairo YouTube Page - Data Viz Tips
An Introduction to Flourish:
Basic Tips:
It’s all about the templates. Select the one that best matches your idea
Do your math, sorting, formatting in Excel before uploading to Flourish. Easier
There are hidden menus and functions in the data section. A bit frustrating but you will figure it out.
How To Import Data:
Import data from Google Sheets
If your data isn’t sorting:
It may be in text format
Flourish doesn’t like % signs - text
Strip out % in Excel, reimport
Flourish Design Tips
Labels: be judicious with text labels.
Sorting: have the chart tell a story - sorting.
X axis labels. rotate the x axis labels, drop the font a bit and get more of the counties represented. bump up the fonts on the x axis. rather faint.
Delete rows “missing county info”
Labels: “Become the boss of this data.” We take control of ridiculous labels. What is “administrative support and waste management and remediation services” - what does that mean?
Style: your credit at the bottom in the footer
Annotations
They are applied once you have created a Flourish story:
Once you’re finished creating your visualization, click on the “Create story” button in the top right corner.
This will take you through to a new Flourish story with your visualization as the first slide.
Check how to create a single slide story in Flourish.
If your chart is too busy and has too many numbers, take control and use annotations to specify just the numbers you want.
Colors:
See how Sarah Komar highlighted Arkansas as red on this chart.
Under Colors | Custom overrides, she selected the variable Arkansas to be red.
Arkansas: red Here’s a great article on customizing colors.
Popups: Format and manage popups on your charts.
How to Create Stories in Flourish
Ravi Brock on Creating Stories Quickly
Here’s a sample workbook to check.
Make a copy of this chart
Expand down arrow menu next to name “EXAMPLES-STORY”
Duplicate
Rename, mess around with it
Next Section: More Flourish Resources
3.1 More Flourish Resources
Create an Active and New Cases Map
Click data.
On the Regions layer upload “arkansascounties.json”
That file is on Github
Click the arrow button next to “Upload data” and select “Upload data and merge”
Then upload countyonlytoday.csv and merge on “NAME” and “County_Name”
76 rows should be imported
Geometry should be column A. Name should be column G.
Select Active_cases, Active_cases_10k_pop, Confirmed_active, Probable_active, New_cases_today, New_cases_today_10k_pop, Pct_pos_new_to_dashboard (columns:U,AV,AE-AF,AO,AU,AX) for the values
Make sure no counties are missing/greyed out on map
In top right corner, select Export
Video tutorial on maps
Design Ideas From Adam Marton, Univ. of Maryland Time map - map with time slider Twitter timelines - good for events Election results chart Icon map Photo slider Sankey - 2 Table Parliament “C” chart - useful for showing votes on an issue, more Sports - player positions on a field Chord diagram- visualize connections between entities Survey / Dot viz (good for exploring survey results and more) Arc map - display connections between points on a map Cards - 2 - blocks in a grid (candidates, much more) Quiz Bar race / Line race Point map - 2 - visualize large data sets on a map, animate around it Animated scatterplot Elections | Elections 2 Examples: https://flourish.studio/examples/
- Graphic stories and animated stories
- Bar chart race
- Animated dot animation
- Animated charts
- Animated maps
Misc Links
Here's a year in review for 2019 - Inspiration and new ideas abound
How to control different Flourish accounts
Cairo Video: Scatter plot and animation
Video: Create Basic world Map
Create a scatter plot with a filter
Controling access to visualizations and stories
Examples from Fall 2020 Class Abby Zimmardi - Colleges and universities and COVID/ Abby Zimmardi - School Districts, Active COVID Cases/ Mary Hennigan and Hospital Resources statewide/
Background: Flourish newsrooms plan Private projects, HTML export and much more! Get started here In case your account has administrative privileges for your newsroom, you will be able to invite more users to your newsroom. You can find more information on how to do that and how to administer your newsroom here. Our extensive help docs are carefully crafted to help you overcome the occasional issue you may run into, and also show you how to create cool things. You can find them here.