One of my ongoing projects is helping my dear friend and colleague Daryl brainstorm on how we can most effectively translate our goals into simple, pretty, and actionable visualizations – I always harp on the import of actionable visualization.

In spending more time with modern visualization tools, like everyone, I’ve come across d3.js – a JavaScript library dedicated to Data Driven Documents (d3 get it?)

I read a blog post or two (Mike Bostocks is amazing) and dove into messing around with the library. For fun, I used d3.js to turn an empty pair of body tags into an SVG assembly of the Automattic logo, as you see above. As deep as my affection is for ggplot2, this is still pretty neat.

It was fun, and I’m especially excited to see how d3 plays with live data!
The above is a screenshot – here’s a gist of the code itself.

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