HOW TO MAKE A BUBBLE CHART WITH RAW & ADOBE...

HOW TO MAKE A BUBBLE CHART WITH RAW & ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR

by Jeff Bennett | Digital Splash Media

Get Your Data into a Spreadsheet

Create the Initial Bubble Chart in RAW

Use Illustrator to Style the RAW Bubble Chart

01 02 03INTRO

TABLE OF CONTENTS

by Jeff Bennett | Digital Splash Media 2

Pages 5–15 Pages 16–28Page 4Page 3

BUBBLE CHARTS

Bubble charts are similar to scatter plots, but offer the ability to represent additional variables by the size of the circles as well as colors of the circles. Like scatter plots, they're good for showing the correlation of the variable on the x axis to the variable on the y axis, and, though circle size isn't ideal for close comparison of values, the bubble size can give a basic sense of an additional variable.

Bubble charts can be created easily with basic spreadsheet software, but formatting and styling options are limited.

The Scenario


Generating a bubble chart with Density Design's RAW tool is quick and easy and editing the output in Illustrator gives you a lot of control of format and style. The generated charts from RAW have a few formatting and styling quirks. This tutorial will walk you through a process of creating a basic bubble chart in RAW, exporting it as an .svg file that you can then open with Adobe Illustrator and adjust the format and style of the chart elements.

The first thing you’ll need of course is the data. For this bubble chart I wanted to show the correlation of cardiovascular disease death rate (CVD Death Rate Avg) to average cholesterol in the blood stream for each country, with the size of the bubbles represented by the obesity rate for each country.

I collected the data from the World Health Organization. The initial data was segregated into data for men and women. To simplify things, I used a simple average function in the spreadsheet to come up with average values for each variable.

Once you have your data in your spreadsheet, select all your data and copy it.

STEP 1 - GET YOUR DATA INTO A SPREADSHEET


Point your browser to raw.densitydesign.org and click the USE IT NOW! button.

STEP 2 - CREATE THE INITIAL BUBBLE CHART IN RAW


http://raw.densitydesign.org/

http://raw.densitydesign.org/

On the following page, RAW gives you a text area where you will paste in your copied text from your spreadsheet.



Paste in your copied text from your spreadsheet. You can actually paste in more columns than you intend to use, because RAW gives you the ability to map your column data to dimensions of the bubble chart.



With the most recent update to RAW, you can choose to see your data as a table versus comma-delimited by clicking on the small table icon in the top right corner.



Scroll down to the Layout area where you'll see examples of the chart options available. Choose Scatter Plot.



Once you've selected the scatter plot option, scroll down and you'll notice that RAW will give you several buttons representing the columns you copied from your spreadsheet. In this example, we have four columns so four buttons are available. You'll also notice that there are drop zone areas for you to map your columns to the bubble chart by dragging and dropping each button to a corresponding drop zone dimension of the bubble chart.

Drag each button to the corresponding drop zone. In this example, I want the cholesterol on the X axis, CVD death rate on the Y axis, obesity rate to represent the size of the bubble and colors and labels to be determined by the country name.



Once you've mapped your data, RAW will immediately generate a bubble chart. Scroll down to view the bubble chart along with options for colors and sizing the chart.

Before going on, notice how RAW places some of the bubbles right on the x and y axes and the right and top borders. This is one of the quirks I mentioned but there is a work around and you'll need to go back to your spreadsheet to make a few minor edits.



The trick to fix RAW's bubble placement quirk is to include some fake values in your spreadsheet to be the outliers on the chart. Here's my same spreadsheet but with two additional rows of fake data. The trick is to enter new minimum and maximum values for each column. For example, to get France's bubble to not be on the x-axis, I insert a new value of 120 in the CVD Death Rate Avg column so that bubble will have a lower y value than France and will lie on the X axis instead. Once you've entered new minimum and maximum values for each column, copy your data again and go back to RAW and paste it in again, and go through the mapping processes again as well.



When RAW generates this new chart with the fake values, all the real bubbles you care about are off the axis and border lines. If we weren't going to clean this chart up in Illustrator we wouldn't want this of course, but once you download the .svg file and import it into Illustrator, you'll be able to just delete those two fake bubbles in the top right and bottom left corners.





You can change the colors of the bubbles in RAW if you'd like, or leave them as they are for now and adjust them in Illustrator if you want to change them.

You can also specify the size of the bubble chart. For this chart, I've specified a width of 1280 pixels and a height of 720 pixels in case I want to use the chart in an HD video.



Once you have all of your settings defined, enter a filename and click the Download button. RAW will export a .svg file to your computer that you'll then open with Illustrator to style the bubble chart.

When you open the .svg file in Illustrator you should see a chart that looks virtually identical to what was in RAW. If you open the Layers window you should see that every element of the chart is a group within a larger group.

Save your file as a .ai file.


STEP 3 - USE ILLUSTRATOR TO STYLE THE RAW BUBBLE CHART

I like to ungroup things to make the individual elements that much easier to select and work with.



Now it's easy to delete the two bubbles that represent the fake data.

I also like to arrange the elements in their own layers to make selection of similar elements like all of the bubbles or all of the grid lines, that much easier for changing colors, fonts, line weights, etc.

Next, we'll work on cleaning up the elements in this chart.





The grid lines that RAW generates are pretty dark. Lighter grid lines, or even no grid lines at all, will make the chart look much better. Select all of the grid lines by clicking in your Layers palette just to the right of the small circle on the Grid Lines layer. This will select all of the grid lines.

Once all the grid lines are selected, change the stroke color to the lightest gray in your color palette.



If you'd like, change the fill color of each of the bubbles. Here I've changed each bubble color to correspond to a color in the corresponding country's flag. The colors are a bit intense so I dialed back the opacity of the bubbles to 70%.

You could also use color to represent a fourth variable by mapping colors to certain values or range of values. Here, I'm just using color to distinguish and represent individual country names.



Next, reformat the text labels for each bubble. Here I changed the font to Univers, changed the font size to 14 and moved the labels off the bubbles to make them more readable.



Next, reformat the grid labels. Select the Grid Labels layer to select all of that layer's text and change the font and font size. I used Univers and font size 14 again. You'll also need to align the labels with the grid lines, and move the labels away from the X and Y axis a bit, and expand your art board to accommodate that and leave room for axis labels.



Next, add the labels for the X axis and Y axis.





You may have noticed that the vertical grid lines extend a little to high. Select all of them and drag down to the top-most horizontal grid line.



Add a title and a legend for the bubbles sizes and the bubble chart is getting pretty close.



Since I'm not trying to represent actual values for each country in this chart, but rather show general correlations, the grid lines aren't really that helpful. So, I've deleted them from the chart and just put tick marks on the X axis and Y axis. This cleans up the chart quite a bit.



Here's a comparison of the original RAW chart to my newly formatted and styled bubble chart.

Go ahead and give it a try. RAW is such an easy tool to use that I think you'll quickly get the hang of this process and find yourself using it more and more as your link between your spreadsheet data and generating vector graphics data visualizations.

HOW TO MAKE A BUBBLE CHART WITH RAW & ADOBE...

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