Using Flourish for Beautiful Animated Plots: a Tutorial
A quick introduction to creating stunning visualizations without coding
Animated plots are fantastic for giving your audience a sense of how things change. In a way, it helps tell a story of our data. When thinking about observing change in our data, time is the most obvious choice, but these visualizations can use any column variable to add another dimension to our analysis. This is extremely powerful in illustrating complex ideas and relationships to our audience — and the animated motion naturally attracts their eyes and attention.
Flourish isn’t the only game in town for animated plots — Plotly is the general go-to , with code very similar to Matplotlib. Surprisingly, even matplotlib can create animated plots with the PillowWriter function within matplotlib.animation , though just making simple plots is pretty tricky. What makes Flourish different is that it’s a no-code solution, with all knobs and dials to customize your plot within a web-based graphical user interface. It makes adjusting the aesthetics of your plot just a click away, with adjustments happening in real-time. Flourish also excels in making things look great right out of the box in most cases.
For Flourish, as in most things, the best learning is by doing. I’ve generated a racing bar…
