Flourish year in review 2021

Looking back at the year that was – across our community, product and company

Posted on 21 December 2021 by Flourish team

In many ways, this year felt like an extension of the previous one, due to a pandemic that continued to dominate lives around the globe. In that context, it’s no surprise that COVID remained a key visualization topic for the ever-growing Flourish community, along with other big themes such as climate, politics and the Olympics. Flourish the company also saw a lot of growth: the team almost doubled in size since January, as did the number of business customers. Let’s take a moment to look back over the year, starting with a few top-level community numbers.

Still remote: winter

💬✨🖼️ Introducing popup panels 🖼️✨💬

In addition to popups, you can now add panels to your Radar and Projection map visualizations, giving you more flexibility to tell rich data stories.

👉 Learn more and check out the examples in our blog: https://t.co/XMpemhq2Ig pic.twitter.com/Xg6rk49o46
— Flourish (@f_l_o_u_r_i_s_h) March 4, 2021

At the start of the year, our team was still remote and under lockdown rules. With the pandemic requiring an ever-greater amount of information to be presented, we launched popup panels to help our users tell richer data stories. Seeking distraction and inspiration from seminal data visualizers, we also launched our first “Masters series” blog post.

More product improvements ✨

We shipped several improvements for our business customers, including custom fonts in stories, enforceable multi-factor authentication and republication approvals
Our “3D map” template became much more powerful through raster tile support, annotations, a heatmap mode and new animations
We introduced improvements such as shading between lines in our “Line, bar, pie” template
It became possible to use public data files from Dropbox with our Live CSV feature

Some community visuals: COVID

The big thaw: spring

In the spring we introduced some chart accessibility guidelines and also made our editor more accessible by adding improved keyboard navigation. We opened our “Tea Break” webinar series to the whole community and enhanced our maps with a host of new features. On our blog, we took a deep-dive into visualizing local elections and celebrated the arrival of two new mini templates: “Number ticker” and “Countdown”.

More product improvements 🌤️

We added new styles, an aspect ratio mode and filtering to “Slope charts”
The “**Scatter**” template got alignment and styling for labels
We allowed you to color your “Radar” visualizations by a category
Our “Sankey” template received filtering capabilities and a setting for adding node headings
We added popup panels and improved filtering to our “Cards” template

Some community visuals: politics & society

Brief normality: summer

Over the summer, the global news cycle started to become more varied again, with several sports events making headlines, most notably the Tokyo Olympics. To celebrate, we launched a new “Sports race” template and wrote posts about visualizing both the Olympics and the Euros. We also launched our popular “Pictogram” template, and – after 18 months of working from home – moved into a lovely new office space in Shoreditch, London’s tech capital.

More product improvements 😎

We added a new visualization type, the Waterfall chart, to our “Line, bar, pie” template
Our “Quiz” was enhanced with support for HTML inputs, making it possible to display images as questions
We published a simple five-step guide to data visualization
We recreated some of the IPCC’s climate charts and drew lessons on how charts can help us communicate effectively
We added a new “reveal” mode to our “Line chart race” template
We made it possible to download GeoJSON files directly from your data tab
The “Slope chart” template received improved labelling with automatic overlap prevention, connector lines and richer styling settings

Some community visuals: economics and sports

Environmental emergency: autumn

Need specific regions for your Flourish map? Visit our new GeoJSON repository, full of reliably-sourced regions that have been tested and resized, all ready to download and use for your own custom maps! 🌍🗺

👉Click here to see all of our new resources: https://t.co/oLp0fJv1e0 pic.twitter.com/SdBUUcDkZ6
— Flourish (@f_l_o_u_r_i_s_h) October 1, 2021

After a summer full of weather extremes, and with world leaders converging on Scotland for the COP26 conference, climate became a key visualization topic for the community. On the blog, we wrote about the strengths and weaknesses of different chart types. And we introduced two new templates: “Gantt chart” and “Word cloud”. Finally, we unveiled a brand-new training series for our business and enterprise customers.

More product improvements 📊

The latest “Masters series” focused on the visualization legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois
By popular demand, we launched a repository of GeoJSON files for making custom maps
It became possible to set Flourish stories to autoplay on load
We added a thumbnail feature that lets you access a static image of any published visualization on a fixed URL
We improved Flourish’s data merging feature

Some community visuals: environment

21 in 21

One final thing to celebrate: in 2021 we welcomed 21 new amazing team members, each of whom have helped shape Flourish’s evolution.

With the end of the year in sight, we’re ready to wind down for a much-needed break. Thank you so much for all your ideas and feedback this year – and for all the incredible visualizations and stories you’ve created. We can’t wait to see what you make in 2022!

Data visualization and storytelling