FLOURISH: DIY DATA JOURNALISM CHARTS

You don't have to be a highly skilled data journalist to create interesting graphs and charts. There are a large number of internet sites were you can drop your data  and retrieve in seconds awesome graphics to embed on your news blog or website. I have been working in my training with for example Datawrapper, Plotly, Tableau. Recently a tweet by Alberto Cairo draw my attention to Flourish. Amazing! Flourish, based on a cooperation with Google Newslab, easily beats the competition. And of course for free. Create an account, login, choose a template and you are in business.
I played around with it, using some data of the Worldbank.  I selected a number of Sub-Sahara countries and download life expectancy and gdp per cap from 2000 to 2014. Here is my creation, done in a few minutes.

As you can see the countries have different colors; the size of the dot reflect the population. The moving charts shows the development over the years from 2000 to 2014 for all countries or you can zoom in on one country.
Of course there is much more. Here are some static charts show the relationship per country.

One of the mayor problems with creating visualizations is that they can be download as an image, that is a bitmap. Then the viz will not be for for print. Flourish gives you the possibility to download 

viz as .svg that can be reworked for print with for example Inkscape

Flourish depends on templates, ready made vizs, which you change by uploading your own data.

The number and variance of templates is large. With one template, a map, Flourish anticipates the local elections in NL, scheduled for March. Of course you can create your own templates, but then you go deeper into coding.

Flourish is free, but by publishing you share your data with other users.

Finally, Flourish gives you the possibility to create stories. They bind all your visualization on a certain news item together in a presentation, then publish the story as an embedded link.