New: SankeyMATIC has a Patreon!

If you are a regular user of SankeyMATIC and would like to contribute to the continuing improvement of this site, consider joining.

There are 4 tiers of support.

Above the lowest tier, you can get a link back to your own site from the About page.

At the highest tier, you can also have your logo and a link on the home page (which averages over a thousand visitors per day).

For more details, visit patreon.com/sankeymatic

New Sample Diagram: “Journey”

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:

New, improved News Page!

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.

You’ll be seeing more here soon!

New Site Section: Data

I’ve added a new tab to the top menu bar: Data: Interesting Diagrams from the Real World.

The first examples there show financial results for companies over time, with the first (of several) being Apple.

You may have already seen such diagrams presented elsewhere in Sankey form. What’s new here is:

  1. Each diagram is overlaid on the same period’s results from the year before
  2. There’s a slider so you can compare them.

Here’s a static screenshot of one:

A Sankey diagram summarizing Apple's 2023 financial results. The main node shows Apple's 2023 Net Sales figure of 383 billion dollars. On the input side, that figure is subdivided into Products and Services, with the Products node further broken down into individual product lines (iPhone, Wearables, Mac, iPad). On the output side, the Net Sales is broken up to show what portion is Cost of Sales (4B) vs Margin (9B). More stages are shown, subtracting more expenses, until the bottom line is reached at the diagram's bottom right corner: Net Income for 2023 of ,995M
Apple’s 2023 Net Sales diagram

(Note that on the page itself, you’ll also get some highlighting & tooltips when hovering that you can’t see in this image.)

And here’s an animated example showing Apple’s 2024 results and a slider revealing the prior year’s results:

Animation. A sankey diagram describing Apple's Q1 2024 results is shown. A slider bar at the right of the diagram is grabbed by a mouse pointer and is dragged to the left of the diagram, revealing a diagram of Apple's 2023 Q1 results for comparison.

(cross-posted from vis.social/@SankeyMATIC)

Before & After: Social header image

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.

"Before" image from November 2022: Below the title "Sample Diagram Starting Points", three sample sankey diagrams are shown: "Job Search", "Ranked Election", and "Basic Budget". All of the labels on the sample diagrams are the same small size and are hard to read.
November 2022
"After" image from January 2024: Four sample sankey diagrams are presented as though they were printed out and scattered in a pile. The labels on each appear in a variety of readable sizes and positions, including some nodes where the label is centered. The diagrams depict four scenarios: "Job Search", "Financial Results", "Ranked Election" and "Budget".
January 2024

(adapted from vis.social/@SankeyMATIC)

EDD

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.”

…and repeat, endlessly.

(cross-posted from tilde.zone/@nowthis)

More on New Label Features

Two upcoming SankeyMATIC Label features about to ship –

New Feature #1 – Placement & sizing

Names and Values can be placed on separate lines and can be given different sizes.

The Job Search example shows how this can allow larger & more readable labels by using the available space differently:

A before & after comparison of a Job Search flow diagram made with mock data using SankeyMATIC. From left to right, the diagram shows a total of 17 Applications which flow into three separate nodes: 4 "No Answer", 9 "Rejected", and 4 "Interview". The "Interview" flow is broken down further as the job search process continues through more stages, ending in 1 offer Accepted and 1 offer Declined. In the 'before' version, all names & values in the labels are on the same line and are shown at the same small size. In the 'after' version, the value for each node is presented on its own line first (using a very large text size), and the name of the node is on a second line. The name's size is smaller than the value's, but it is still a larger text size than the 'before' image. Annotations on the 'after' image read: * 'Values can be placed on their own lines.' * 'Values and names can be different sizes.' * 'This can make more room for your labels to be *larger* and more readable.'

New Feature #2 – Scaling based on value

You can make each label larger or smaller based on the amount it represents.

The Financial Results example shows how this can help draw attention to specific areas of your image:

A before & after comparison of a Financial Results flow diagram made with mock data using SankeyMATIC. In this diagram, 3 company divisions (A, B, and C) join their revenue amounts into a single 'Revenue' node with a value of ,800, which is then split into Gross Profit (,000) and Cost of Sales (0). The Gross Profit amount is further broken down into smaller Expenses of various kinds until a remaining Net Profit of 0 is shown. In the 'before' version, all names and values in the labels are on the same line and are shown at the same small size. In the 'after' version, each name is shown first on its own line and the amount is on a second line using a larger text size. The key difference being shown is that each label's overall size is scaled according to the amount it represents. * The largest node is 'Revenue' (,800), and its label is presented using the largest text size. * The smallest node is 'Amortization' (), and its label's text size is much smaller. * All other nodes in between have labels sized in between those two extremes, scaled according to their own amounts. Annotations on the 'after' image read: * 'Labels can be *magnified* based on their amounts' * 'Largest amount = largest label' (placed next to the 'Revenue' node * 'Smallest amount = smallest label' (placed next to the 'Amortization' node)

Open the ‘Labels‘ panel in the left column to use the new features.

(cross-posted from vis.social/@SankeyMATIC)

Fun things I’ve been learning lately about the modern ways to do things on the web:

  • The Blob API!
    (For generating downloadable export files on demand.)
  • async Promises!
    (For accepting an uploaded file and obtaining its text. Special guest star: Blob.text().)
  • CSS Grid layout!
    (Because I should probably remake the whole layout with it someday.)

As always, MDN Web Docs has been invaluable for documentation and examples.

A cool feature is cooking!

(cross-posted from vis.social/@SankeyMATIC)