I came across Aman Bhargava’s post today showing how to make embroidered charts using R, and I found the look really appealing and eye-catching. I wanted a way to generate the same type of charts for myself, but I mostly do data analysis and charts in Python, not R. Ideally for my workflow, I’d be able to use this visual technique without needing to incorporate R into my data visualization pipeline.
Thankfully though, Aman has licensed his work under CC BY-SA 4.0, so I was able to reimplement his technique in Python. This also uses the embroidery ImageMagick script by Fred Weinhaus. The source code for my implementation is available at https://github.com/lucasmelin/embroidery.
I really like how the charts turn out with this effect, here’s a couple of examples.
