If you are reading this guide it’s because you are interested in data visualization, a discipline that is becoming more and more important in many fields. Many visual models have been conceived and identified in the past several years, but their production is difficult for non-technical users and coding knowledge and a significant amount of time is still required to master the libraries and the tools that allow to create them.
The idea behind RAWGraphs is to provide a way to easily explore your data and create visualization without coding skills.
Starting from our experience as designers, we realised that the visualisation process is not linear. Thus, it cannot be solved using a single tool. Rather, when designing visualisations, it is common to move from tool to tool depending on the function and approach one needs for a particular task. Therefore, we created a platform to achieve the most difficult task without using code: the encoding of data dimensions on uncommon visual models.
What you have to do is simple:
1. Load your data
2. Choose a chart
3. Map your data dimensions to the visual variables of the chart
4.Tune your visualization and export
1. No fee and no registration required. RAWGraphs is open and free for everybody
As designers and/or developers dealing with data visualization, we have to acknowledge the fact that our work would certainly be much different if many free and open source solutions didn't exist. We think about many existing projects like Gephi, Open Refine, D3js or Scriptographer (R.I.P), which we were able to use for free and that shaped our processes and our skills. We wanted to pay back our contribution making people able to play with visualization and develop their data-literacy for free.
2. RAWGraphs doesn’t store data.
Even though RAWGraphs is a web app, the data you insert will be processed only by the web browser. No server-side operations or storages are performed, no one will see, touch or copy your data.
3. Open outputs optimized for your design process.
RAWGraphs allows you to export your visualizations in .svg. You can open them in your favorite vector graphics editor and improve them as you prefer. No more impossible to edit pdfs or raster images.