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The Weekly Chart turns 400

Portrait of Rose Mintzer-Sweeney
Rose Mintzer-Sweeney

Hi it’s Rose! I’m Datawrapper’s deputy head of communications and today I’m celebrating a Weekly Chart milestone.

Four hundred weeks is a ripe old age for a blog series. It was already almost two years ago that we celebrated the 300th Weekly Chart with a big retrospective, including lots of illustrations and charts analyzing the chart types, topics, and authors of its first six years. But although Weekly Chart has gotten older, it’s never stopped learning new tricks. So for this anniversary, I decided to create three charts that wouldn’t have been possible back in 2023.

Let’s start with a look at how our chart usage developed over these years:

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Small multiple line charts were launched in February 2024, and have already featured in seven Weekly Charts.

Our favorite chart types haven’t changed much: nine out of our top ten favorite charts were the same in both periods. But their rankings shuffled a bit — choropleth maps, for example, climbed from fifth place to second — and one notable newcomer has already elbowed its way to the top.

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The comparison columns in this chart were launched in February 2025. This is their Weekly Chart debut!

The Weekly Chart would never have made it this long if the work weren’t shared. As the team has grown, we often have more eager authors than there are weeks in the year — so consider these numbers a floor, not a ceiling, on our Weekly Chart enthusiasm!

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Did you catch it? This is a bar chart, which Datawrapper has offered from the very beginning. But this bar chart is dressed up with text annotations, which only launched in November 2024.


And finally, thanks to all the loyal readers — there wouldn't be a Weekly Chart without you! Come back next week for number four hundred and one.

Portrait of Rose Mintzer-Sweeney

Rose Mintzer-Sweeney (she/her, @rosemintzers) is a data vis writer on Datawrapper’s communications team. She likes words, numbers, pictures, and all possible combinations of the same. Rose lives in Berlin.

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