Happy International Chart Day from the Engineers Behind Chartlos

Today is the first International Chart Day, and to mark this historic occasion, we wanted to tell the story of Dow Jones’s internal chart-making tool, Chartlos. With charts, of course.

Dow Jones journalists routinely use charts to make the invisible visible, putting breaking news into context by illustrating long-term trends. Chartlos is a web app that allows reporters, editors and graphic designers to quickly create and customize infographics in a wide range of sizes that adhere to their publications’ styles.

The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones’s oldest and largest publication, printed charts for decades before photos were introduced into the paper in the early 2000s. Today, staffers must make charts that fit devices ranging from smartphones to tablets to extra-wide monitors. Without Chartlos, these many different sizes would need to be created by hand using Adobe Illustrator — an extremely time-consuming task. But in just one click, Chartlos instantly renders up to 13 different versions for print, websites and apps.

Developed in-house by the newsroom engineering team, Chartlos launched in early 2016 and is rapidly being adopted across the newsroom. Along with the graphics department, which uses Chartlos for straightforward daily charts, reporters and editors with no design experience can easily make ready-to-publish charts. In case you were wondering, the moniker was inspired by a former Wall Street Journal graphics director named Carlos.

Built in React, Node and Postgres and leveraging the Highcharts API, Chartlos supports seven different chart types, including scatter plots, which were added in April.

Each Dow Jones publication has its own styles, including fonts, colors and axis layouts. Chartlos automatically formats charts properly for the respective publication.

As the headline of the following chart notes, we recently added support for Japanese-language characters. (Exact translation: Japanese is also available in Chartlos.)

Chartlos is especially valuable at moments such as a stock market crash or the monthly jobs report release, when upwards of 70 charts are created in one day.

Chartlos offers users a wide variety of options and advanced features to customize charts, from annotations and legends, to colors and dotted lines, to X- and Y-axis formats and intervals.

Our team is constantly adding new features and making performance improvements to Chartlos, and we’re in regular communication with users to get feedback. In the coming year leading up to the second annual International Chart Day, our plans include integrating the ability to display live market data.

Many thanks to Elliot Bentley, Dov Friedman and Mayumi Tanaka for their contributions to this blog post.