6 examples of beautiful Marimekko charts (a.k.a. mosaic plots) & 2 examples with D3 code!

Double-duty examples of Marimekkos that are both beautiful and interesting, plus tips on when to use them

A blank example of a Marimekko chart from DataVizCatalogue

What’s a Marimekko chart? 🤔

The easiest way to understand any graph type or visual is to look at it, so let’s take the blank example above.

A few things you might notice right off the bat:

• It looks like a bar chart (or a column chart).
• It looks like a stacked bar chart, a 100% stacked bar chart.
• But both the width and height of the bars vary…so it’s like a 2D stacked bar + column chart, where both axes are 100% stacked.

And voila, there you go! That’s a Marimekko chart (or, if you prefer, mosaic plot): a two-dimensional stacked chart where both the column widths and bar heights are scaled to 100%, so the proportions of the two variables dictate how tall and wide the rectangles are.

If you’re a graph nerd, here’s how you might define a Marimekko chart in terms of other graph types:

• a two-way, 100% stacked bar graph (since in addition to showing data via varying heights, you also get the added…