The Journey to an Attractive Visualization

Exploring Plotly vs. Plotly Express

As a budding Data Scientist and data nerd, things like the sub-Reddit “Data Is Beautiful” tend to bring joy to my morning. I especially like the visualizations that are animated. I find them beautiful and informative and I absolutely needed to learn how to create them.

I decided the most efficient way to learn would be to mimic a visualization from Reddit. Authors tend to leave notes on their process or links to their Github, which I figured would be helpful to get me started. I decided to choose a visualization that looked relatively simple, but one that still made me think “Cool!” as soon as I saw it:

The author linked to where he found the data and to his Github for details on how he created the dataframe. The bad news: the visualization was made with D3.js. While I plan to learn D3, I imagine the learning curve will be longer than a few days. So, I decided to seek other ways I might be able to recreate a similar visualization.

As stated by anaconda.org, Plotly.py is “an interactive, open-source, and JavaScript-based graphing library for Python. Built on top of plotly.js, plotly.py is a high-level, declarative charting library that includes over 30 chart types, including scientific charts, 3D graphs, statistical charts, SVG maps, financial charts, and more.” If JavaScript was responsible for the beautiful animations I was seeing on Reddit, I felt confident that a JS-based library for Python would be a good start to my visualization journey.

And this is what my code looked like:

As you can see, IT’S A LOT OF CODE! To create the animation, I needed to build the figure frame by frame. Creating the slider was also cumbersome. There is certainly a learning curve to using plotly.py and I relied heavily on the API’s tutorial for my first try. For my second try, I attempted to put a slider on a Choropleth map using what I learned from my first try, the plotly.py documentation, and Google — and I just couldn’t figure it out.

The code:

So much easier!

The real test: can I animate a Choropleth map?

I sure can! The code:

I have to admit, the choropleth animation didn’t come out as cool as I thought it might, but I was still super impressed with how easy it was to create. I think Plotly Express will likely be one of my go-to libraries for visualizations in the future!

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