Most charts show one or two variables and call it done. Blobchart takes those charts and unlocks what they left out — through extra dimensions and through the shape of the space itself.
A bar chart shows one variable. A scatter plot manages three if you're lucky. Somewhere in that third variable, the story usually lives.
Bar charts show one thing. Line charts two. And somewhere in that missing third variable, the story usually lives — the size of the phenomenon, the weight of the exception, the thing that changes everything.
Blobchart takes existing visualizations and adds what they were missing: a dimension encoded in area. Not to replace a bar chart, but to transform it — to make visible what the original format was forced to hide.
The bet: a bubble chart built from a familiar shape carries the reader from what they already know into something they couldn't see before.
Blobchart · Switzerland · Solo project · D3.js
Every Blobchart transformation uses one or both of these mechanisms. No others.
A bar chart encodes one value per bar. Add bubble radius and that same chart now shows two — the original variable plus a second, encoded in size. What was implicit becomes explicit.
Sometimes the layout itself is wrong. A bar chart sorted by name instead of value loses the shape. Mapping the same data onto a scatter — x as one variable, y as another — can reveal a relationship that was always there, just never visible.
Not guidelines. Not suggestions. These are the rules the format is built on.
Adding size, color, or a new axis is a claim: that this variable changes the reading. If it doesn't, it's decoration — and we don't do decoration.
Each issue begins with the source chart. You see what was there and what was added. The upgrade is transparent — not sleight of hand. Sources cited, code open.
More encodings means more shape — not more precision. When a table would be more honest, we'll say so. The format earns its use, dataset by dataset.
Blobchart is a personal project run by one person with a background in data visualization. The premise is narrow by design: one chart family, two levers, zero decoration.
The charts are built to be remembered. Not because they're styled, but because they show something that wasn't visible before — through an extra dimension, or through a layout that finally matches the shape of the data.
No newsletter. No inbox. One transformation at a time, posted across the usual feeds.