I came across PureViz in my LinkedIn feed a week or two ago. It immediately caught my attention because lo and behold, there was a rotating turbine 🙂
“Ooh is that the HTML Content visual?” I pondered. “No, a new one entirely!”
Hmm… better check it out…
I suspected that the visual would have its limitations. I couldn’t imagine that it would handle vertical bars and polygon paths very well – but that’s not the point. Let’s see what it can do.
I revisited my Turbine report, downloaded the PureViz visual and imported the SVG.
First impressions – this is an incredible viz, a lot of hard work has gone into it. It had a lot more features than I had anticipated – remarkably sophisticated for a first release.
It can’t manipulate points on polygon paths, but *gasp* it can fill shapes bottom to top! AMAZING!
I did struggle though trying to connect an individual shape to a category. Whether that is a limitation of the visual or user error I’m not sure.
I couldn’t do anymore with PureViz to recreate any of the elements of the Turbine report.
So I went back to a simpler one.
I again imported the SVG (originally created in Adobe Illustrator), clicked on the nose and tried to apply a formula, whereby length would be added to its original value of 22. This didn’t work, I believe because I had the wrong syntax, but no matter, I could apply this logic within the measure itself.
The image centred, with no apparent options to left-align it. That’s ok though, I imagine I could resize and then re-import it if I needed to.
I finished my adjustments, sat back, then hit play to watch the nose grow. It worked a treat.
Final impressions – the ability to easily modify size, colour and percentage fill to SVG elements makes this a very handy visual for most infographics. It is definitely something to be excited about.