One other note: the buttons I mentioned below which said “use this one as a starting point” are now updated to say “Edit with SankeyMATIC“, like so:
They do the same thing as before, but I think this design gets the point across better – more like the ubiquitous Edit on CodePen buttons you see on web tutorial examples.
Some new example financial diagrams are posted – the latest quarterly results for NVIDIA and for Apple.
NVIDIA 2025 Q2 (ending July 28)
Apple 2024 Q3 (ending June 30)
There’s a fun new feature on each of these pages as well:
The top diagram on each page now has a ‘public link‘ that lets you use it as the starting point for a diagram of your own. Just look for this on each page:
Beyond the new make-your-own links, you’ll see some additional changes if you happened to visit those pages before:
The Data pages are now reorganized. Rather than having an extensive directory structure, there is now just one page for all of a company’s Quarterly diagrams and (in the case of Apple) another for its Annual ones. This should be rather less work to maintain, so hopefully it’ll be easier to keep them up to date.
There is now an index of thumbnails at the top of each page, to help give you a broad overview of recent history before you get into the details. (In data visualization terms, it’s a set of small multiples.)
The quarterly results are arranged in rows of 4 so that you can scan up & down to compare the same quarter across different years. This makes it easier to see at a glance, for instance, NVIDIA’s growth over one year’s time:
The scale which is used for every diagram on a page is now listed at the top.
The next question you might ask is:
Why not use the same scale across all of these pages?
The short answer is, the companies are just too different in size. Considering just NVIDIA and Apple:
If you made NVIDIA use Apple’s scale, most of its diagrams would be pretty tiny, making it hard to arrange labels in any readable fashion. (See NVIDIA’s Q1 2024 for an example where the flows are already getting too small to comfortably label, even at the scale I chose.)
If you made Apple adopt NVIDIA’s scale, then Apple’s diagrams would be incredibly tall.
That’s why each page is considered independently in terms of which diagram scale will provide good readable diagrams at a reasonable size.
For fun, here’s what NVIDIA’s biggest-ever quarter would look like if it did use the same scale as Apple’s latest quarter (compare to the NVIDIA image above):
There’s a new Sample Diagram to try out at the top of the Build-a-Diagram page: Journey, which demonstrates how you can produce traceable paths for multiple players across multiple stages by using a specific approach to encoding your data.
It was added in February of this year. The conditions required for this kind of diagram to work are:
Each flow maintains a single color from start to end.
All flows for a particular player must be listed together.
The “Arrange the Diagram” control must be set to “Using the exact input order”.
In the sample diagram, every flow for every player has the same value (1), but that condition isn’t absolutely necessary as long as the other conditions are met.
This diagram style can be used for such things as a ranking chart for team standings in a league (sometimes called a “bump chart”).
This post prompted me to go track down when each of the other sample diagram types was added, for comparison:
This News page is now a proper weblog, no longer a manually-maintained static page.
This means several good things:
It’s easier to update! Making a new post takes way less effort than it did before, and I plan to take advantage of that to post updates here much more often.
A bunch of history has been filled in. See the “Archives” section in the sidebar for links to many past posts I have cross-posted from the site’s Mastodon account at vis.social/@SankeyMATIC. (The newest item on this page until a couple of days ago was from late 2022, so there was a lot to fill in.)
There’s an RSS Feed now, to make it easier to follow updates here if you are so inclined.
This section now has a lot of the other benefits of an actual blog – there’s a Search box, and posts can be categorized & tagged, and on and on.
There have been many changes to SankeyMATIC in the last year.
One quick snapshot of what’s changed can be seen in the updated header image on social media which shows off new examples of what you can do on the site; the old & new images are attached here so you can see some of the differences, especially in how much easier the labels can be to read.
I haven’t written much about my development approach to this project –
It’s not TDD, not BDD, but EDD: “Embarrassment-Driven Development”.
Basically years of conversations with myself that go like this:
– “Hey, [cool advanced feature] would be really awesome.” – “It doesn’t support [extremely basic feature] yet though, Steve.” – “Ouch. You’re right. That’s just embarrassing. Let’s do that first.”
