The 8 dataviz tools I use every single day

I'm not going to lie, I'm in a hurry today 🙈

I'm reviewing the 50 best entries of the Pacific Dataviz Challenge as a jury member and the level is just outstanding!

Interestingly, almost all the best entries use the tech stack I teach in my course. So here is the list of the tools I could not survive without when I need to set up something for a client, or to win a dataviz competition.

1️⃣ R

All viz projects start with data analysis and a story to find. That's R and ggplot2 for me :)

I've dedicated a huge part of my life on the R graph gallery in case you're wondering what R can do. I also teach how to be productive on that step.

Of course, Python works perfectly here too.

2️⃣ The web

If you want customization and interactivity, building your visualization project as a mini website is the only way!

Learning the very little of HTML, CSS and JavaScript will bring you a long way. AI will do the rest.

3️⃣ React

That's the modern way to build websites. It allows you to build it as a set of reusable components, and basically keeps you from going nuts while working on it.

In the dataviz community you'll often hear about Svelte, which is pretty much the same paradigm, but way less adopted.

React is not a little niche tool. It has 251k stars on github!

4️⃣ D3.js

That's a JavaScript library. It does not give you a function like scatterplot() or heatmap(). Instead it gives a multitude of small functions helping the chart creation process. Like a way to transform colors. Or to transform a number into a bubble area.

The dataviz community is more and more going into it. Almost all entries of the dataviz challenge used it!

Look at how popular it's becoming.

That's because it's the pinnacle of dataviz. It used to be hard to learn, but now AI makes it accessible.

Note: I already wrote about what d3 is here.

5️⃣ GitHub

If you don't know how to use it, that's the #1 skill you should learn today.

As soon as you write code, it solves all the classic problems:

• saving code safely
• making it public
• having access to previous versions (version control)
• collaborating

The bonus?

You can instantly transform your code into a public website for free. That's how the R Graph Gallery works for instance! (Well, all my projects actually.)

6️⃣ ShadcnUI

Let's say you need a popover like this in your project. How do you do it?

Nope, you do not code it from scratch. And you do NOT ask an AI to build it either.

It's much more complex to build than you might think. There are hundreds of subtleties that will break behind your back and will make you lose so much time.

Instead, you use the best UI component library on the planet: ShadcnUI. You have 1 line of code to run to get the component in your project, ready to be used and customised.

No wonder it has 120k stars on GitHub.

7️⃣ Claude Code

If you're still using a chat to use AI... well, you're greatly missing out in terms of productivity.

An agent has all the context that the chat misses, and it actually modifies the files for you. Having the right skills setup is key too.

8️⃣ Motion

There are 2 types of animation.

The first one is duration-based. The second one is spring-based. You give no duration at all, it relies on physical properties instead.

Motion is the library that gives you the second one in React. And for dataviz, it's much better. But that deserves a full newsletter issue :)

That's the stack

That's it. That's the tech stack I use every single day 😀

Also, Morgan Depenbush invited me to give a talk to explain how this tech stack solves all the major dataviz frustrations.

Now back to judging. Have a wonderful day!!

Talk soon,
Yan