Kolsuma’s Dashboard Week Diary – Day 3 Flourish

by Kolsuma Aktar

Since we missed some of the days in our dashboard week last week, we got a dashboard week challenge today. Sophie Sparkes (a core consultant at The Information Lab) gave us today’s challenge. We were to look at England and Wales baby name data but could only use Flourish to create our visualisations.

We got data from 1996-2017 and a fellow DS13 cohortian (Jon) helped the rest of the team by doing the general data prep.

Here’s some pros and cons I found for Flourish.

Pros of Flourish:

  • Cool animations
  • Quick layout styles
  • Automatically colour title based on legend
  • Automatically resizes to fit screens (e.g phone layout)
  • Preview pane for animations
  • Example visualisations
  • Can add audio

Cons of Flourish:

  • Doesn’t save colour custom palettes to use in multiple visualisations
  • Can’t see the legend names when assigning colours
  • Needs different data structure per chart type
  • Can’t filter or highlight
  • No parameters or sets
  • No data preparing ability
  • No calculations available
  • Doesn’t handle large data sets

Check out my visualisation story below:


(The first and last page of the story are interactive)


Thanks for reading!

@KolsumaAktar