The Dashboard Week/Day is back! Today we are tasked with building an interactive visualisation on Baby Names in Wales and England using Flourish.

A few things to keep in mind

We started fairly late, it was already past 11 am when we finished our morning training session. We were told we have until 5 pm to finish.

Ok, I usually write the blog post as I go but this time I was struggling with finding the story or just figuring out what I wanted to do. I was thinking about something exploratory which I’ve found out to be very difficult to create in Flourish. I’ve spent a lot of time just exploring my options and building more and more data sources (will explain why).

Good things about Flourish

First of all, it’s pretty cool. The animations are nice and smooth and it gives you a lot of options to play with.

The tool is really intuitive so it’s easy to pick it up.

The views are already there you just need to figure out how the data needs to be structured and just replace the original data in the template.

Not that good things about Flourish

If you use different charts, it is very likely you’ll need the data in adifferent format and so actually a new dataset.

Sadly, all colouring has to be preformatted and can’t be really user-driven.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I think Flourish is a good tool once you know exactly what you want to do. You just pick the chart, check the data structure, prepare your data and replace it.

The formatting gives you many options so you should be able to adjust it to your needs.

You can see my visualisation here. I think the numbers are slightly off which I’ll fix when I have a bit of a time…