🎂 38 charts to make you think and feel

👋 Hi!

Today I’m turning 38. 😳
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Birthdays have always been a slightly painful moment for me, one I use to reflect a bit on the past and the future, often with nostalgia.

Since my life is strongly linked with data visualization, I thought I would celebrate this one by sharing 38 charts that had an impact on my life as a dataviz person.

Some inspired me, some changed the way I think about data, and some represent key moments in my career. Hopefully they will please your eyes and maybe make you think?

Let’s go.

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Code can build a chart?

In 2010 I traveled to Australia for the first time for an internship about wheat and heat resistance. One day my supervisor, Boris Parent, opened R, typed a few lines of code, and generated a simple graph using base R. I was blown away and instantly knew this was something I wanted to do.

Christmas tree

My master’s degree was not always entertaining. One day I built a small Christmas tree in R in just a couple of minutes and sent it to all my classmates, who had a good laugh. Believe it or not, the professor offered me my first job six months later… to spend my days coding. (full story)

A 3D animated cube

When I defended my master’s thesis, I created the best presentation I could imagine. It featured a rotating 3D cube with my samples appearing progressively while I spoke. I loved building it. Honestly, I’m pretty sure it took me twice as long to create the animation as it did to write the thesis.
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Storytelling with data

This was the first time I saw someone truly telling a story with real dataviz skills. Nadieh Bremer created an interactive chord diagram that is built step by step, with progressive explanations along the way. It showed me how powerful a chart can be when it guides the audience through a narrative.

I’m a surfer

About 90% of the decisions I take in life are driven by surfing, which does not always lead to the best choices. At some point I had to find a way to connect it with dataviz. I built a bot that harvested all the tweets containing the #surf hashtag, then extracted the home and current location of the authors to build this map.

Gapminder

Seeing Hans Rosling tell such a powerful story through a chart was incredibly inspiring. I love speaking in front of people, and great charts make it much easier to convey a strong message. Contact me if you need a dataviz speaker!
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The jungle of JS tools

About nine years ago I discovered the world of web development, and it is very easy to get lost in the jungle of tools. This visualization by Amelia Wattenberger solved a big frustration for me and clarified an ecosystem that initially felt overwhelming.

D3.js anatomy

Another visualization by Amelia shows how the D3.js library is organized. It made me realize that dataviz can also be an incredible support for educational content. I have now been building dataviz online courses for two years and rely heavily on this approach.
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Information is Beautiful

The book Information is Beautiful was gifted to me by a friend. It was the first time I encountered such a large variety of chart types. Seeing the world through the lens of data immediately hooked me.

Chord diagrams and migration

I have always been attracted to circular layouts. I remember spending a lot of time exploring this visualization by Guy Abel about migration flows. It was also around that time that I started diving into R package vignettes during nights and weekends while building the R Graph Gallery.

The Les Misérables heatmap

If you tried to learn D3 many years ago, you probably know the feeling: taking an example, tweaking it for days, and hoping to eventually understand how it works.

This example perfectly represents that experience for me. I modified it endlessly and never truly understood the imperative coding style.

Things are much simpler today with modern frameworks like React. This chart also reminds me how much time you can lose when nobody guides you.

Climate Stripes

Climate change should be our main concern, yet it is not. Those stripes is a great example of how a good dataviz can have a strong impact on humanity. Almost everyone recognizes it and understands its meaning immediately.

Environmental Graffiti

I discovered this data art project by Alisa Singer about eight years ago. It is beautiful and carries a strong message. It was the first time I understood that dataviz could also serve as an artistic medium.

Today I’m very proud to maintain Data-to-Art, a platform dedicated to this intersection between data and creativity.

Lesser-known chart types

This chart was created during a dataviz conference and shows how well known different chart types are.
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It turns out the average graphical literacy still has a lot of room for improvement, which is good news for a dataviz teacher like me.

Land doesn’t vote

A masterpiece by Karim Douieb. It highlights that dataviz can be used to communicate truth, but also to mislead an audience if used incorrectly. I strongly advise to read the full story.

The work of Cédric Scherer

As a ggplot2 lover, I have always been amazed by the work of Cédric Scherer (code here). It also reminds me of a time when the R community was extremely active on Twitter, sharing incredible packages and examples every day.
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Today I am very proud to co-author a ggplot2 course with Cédric. It is a true professional milestone for me.

My first D3 project

In 2017 I went back to Australia to work at the Queensland Brain Institute, and it was an amazing experience. Among many other things, it gave me the opportunity to learn D3.js. After a few hours I knew there was no coming back.

This project became my first published D3 visualization. If you want to create a webpage like this to accompany your own publication or dataset, feel free to contact me 😀.

GitHub heatmap

There is probably no more iconic asset for developers than the GitHub contribution heatmap. It is simple and yet incredibly powerful.
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Looking at mine reminds me that while I have been lucky in life, nothing happened by itself. Each little square represents nights spent building free graph examples for the community.

Teaching is amazing

Debatreyo is one of my best students. He discovered dataviz through my courses and continues to impress me with the results.
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Teaching something and seeing a student produce great work is incredibly rewarding. I love being a teacher on top of consulting.
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​Bonus: small multiples combined with repeating groups across panels is one of my favorite visualization techniques.

Vaccine heatmap

Simple. Efficient. It is hard to imagine a clearer way to show vaccination progress. (code and story)

The Covid spiral

One thing I love about dataviz is that there are no rules carved in stone. Everything can be debated.
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This spiral chart published by the New York Times divided the dataviz community, and there is nothing better than a good dataviz debate.
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Rayshader adventures

How can you not fall in love with maps when tools like Rayshader exist? Following Terence on Twitter has always been a pleasure.
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Shiny

One day someone showed me Shiny, an R package used to create small web applications. I fell in love instantly. Switching to interactive visualization made my job far more fun.
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The irony is that today I often advise people not to use Shiny at all.

River maps

Another mapping project that is simply too beautiful. I spent hours exploring it. Don't you want to hang this on a wall?

Statistics and dataviz

I love numbers, but I believe the way we teach them is often inappropriate. Complex equations should first be explained visually to develop intuition.
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That is exactly what I try to do with my statistical sandboxes, such as this one explaining R².

The Pudding

In my opinion, The Pudding is the best data-driven media outlet out there. It is a collection of original and polished stories powered by data. When I first discovered it, I did not even realize this kind of storytelling was possible.
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Check this one for instance!

Wind map

I am obsessed with wind and have been checking forecasts almost daily since I was about twelve (that's when I started sailing). The day I discovered that wind could be visualized like this, I was fascinated.

Pacific Dataviz Challenge

Two years ago I won this dataviz competition with a submission coded in 48 hours. I was very proud of that one. I explain how I made it here.

Bezos’ wealth

Two ideas are important to me in this heartbreaking project.
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First, humans are very bad at understanding large numbers. Saying “three billion” in the news means almost nothing without context or comparison.
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Second, our world will struggle to move in the right direction while such a large share of wealth remains concentrated in the hands of a few individuals.

Hierarchical edge bundling

This is my favorite chart type. It is mesmerizing. This stunning example by Moritz Stefaner shows connections between scientific papers.

The fall of Stack Overflow

AI has shaken the world of content creation.
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I spent many nights building open-source dataviz examples for free. AI models were trained on this content, and now they are slowly replacing the very websites that produced it.
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It is a strange irony... Full article.

Federica Fragapane

I'm not sure which of her pieces I want to select. In my opinion she operates exactly at the intersection between dataviz and data art. Her work is meaningful and beautiful at the same time, and it always makes me feel something. Link.

A new stacked bar chart

A few months ago, in 2025, a new chart design triggered a wave of discussion online. I find it fascinating that in 2026 we are still inventing chart types. I loved the debate around it and enjoyed implementing the design myself using D3.

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The AI era

Everything is about AI these days. Even if I am somewhat pessimistic about its long-term impact on humanity, I see one piece of good news: the level of charts will likely increase dramatically.
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For example, I recently turned a static chart I liked into an upgraded interactive version in just 83 minutes. A few months ago that same project would have taken two full days to build the hover effects and search bar it needed.
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Note that you can learn how to do the same thing thanks to AI!

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That's it!
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It took me way too long to write this so it's definitely time to go now. I hope you discovered a few interesting projects in this list 😀
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See you next week,
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Yan

PS: if a project triggered some feelings to you too, please hit reply! It's always good to know I'm not the only Dataviz geek out there.
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PPS: I share dataviz tips every Saturday. Take a look and subscribe!
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