Zafiro

From the maker of Zafiro

Hi, everyone!

My name is Nancy, and I'm the maker behind Zafiro.

There are lots of great data vis tools out there. If you've worked with data for more than a few minutes, you've probably used at least two of them. Maybe you made a quick figure in a spreadsheet or presentation application, or maybe you used a big-name dashboarding tool. Maybe you used a Python or R library, or edited an example you found in JavaScript. Maybe you have a favorite web tool that you use for the ease and polish.

I've used all of those, too—like really, really used them. I've been making data visualizations in a professional capacity for almost 15 years, and in that time I've cycled through a hefty handful of workflows and tools. In that time my tastes have refined along with my skills, as has my responsiblity to colleagues and teammates that depend on me to steer them towards the right resources. Naturally, that means I've developed a bizarre art form out of picking the right tool for a project, and some incredibly niche muscle memory for toggling between different environments.

I used to daydream about making the next great data vis tool—one that would do all of what I needed in a single place. One where, for example, I could use shapes and patterns, vary opacity, cutomize gridlines and fonts, reverse the legend order, reorder ordinal levels, apply a diverging gradient... And then boom, AI appeared on the scene, and my daydream become a very tangible possibility. Six months of genuinely obsesssed work later, I'm very excited a share this vision outside of my own head.

There are a few things about Zafiro that meaningfully differentiate it from the tools that are currently on the market.

  1. It follows an encodings-first philosophy. In other words, you won't pick "bar chart" and then see a bunch of customizations for "bar chart". Instead, you'll assign the variables from your data set to the types of visual encodings that you want. Those encodings add up to a visual. In the case of a bar chart, you might pick a category for the x position, a quantitative variable for the length of the bars, and another categorical variable for the colors. Move the length variable to the y position, and now you've got a scatterplot! Add a size encoding, and now you have a bubble chart. This is a really big deal for flexibility in your designs and for facilitating real exploration of your data.
  2. It has a higher bar for accessibility. It's not perfect yet, and it might never be. But a major priority for me was to include accessibility attributes for visualizations that are, in my opinion, very oddly neglected elsewhere. You can vary shapes, for example, and add patterns. You can add a border around shapes to aid in differentiation. Black and white testing is built in. At a bare minimum, visualizations should be legible to sighted readers; unfortunately that's not a given in other tools.
  3. You can be really, REALLY picky. I've taken great lengths to allow you to customize and specify every pixel of a figure. I'll take it as a compliment if I can't tell you used Zafiro to make your visual. Your visual should look like your visual, not like mine. I have enough of them already.
  4. And speaking of being picky, I want your team to be picky, too. You can write your own brand specifications so that your dear interns aren't having to clean up a zillion graphs right before a report goes out. If you want size 23 in a silly font for your titles, you can set that as a default, along with your color palettes, grid lines, tick marks, legend swatches, and so much more.
  5. The code is source available. The repo is linked in the footer. If you don't want to use my platform you don't have to. You're welcome to self host or run the tool locally. Have fun (according to the terms of the license that is available in the repository). Zafiro is built on so many open source libraries that this is a small way to give back to the community. You're more than welcome to use the managed platform, too, for convenience.

I hope you enjoy getting to know Zafiro, thinking in terms of encodings, and specifying your visualizations to your heart's content. It's my own personal go-to tool now, and I'd be thrilled to hear if it becomes yours.

Say hello!

I made Zafiro to be useful and enjoyable to use. If you have visualization need that Zafiro doesn't meet, are having trouble with something, or just want to give a virtual high-five, I'd love to hear from you! Use the feedback link in the footer or reach out at hello@zafiro.studio.

Who I am

I'm a professional data visualization practitioner, currently the Data Visualization Lead at a healthcare data company called Trilliant Health. Before that I was at Microsoft doing data visualization for the Azure business, and in between those two I did some adjunct teaching at the University of Washington in the department of Human Centered Design and Engineering. I also have a data visualization textbook out, Data Visualization for People of All Ages. My education is from UC Berekely, where I studied Statistics.