Natalie Portman in Datawrapper form

Imagine finding an actress in your data viz. But what if you made your data viz look like an actress like, say, Natalie Portman?

Elana Levin Schtulberg wrote about her experiences making a Datawrapper graph recreate a photograph:

Of course, Datawrapper is great for creating charts (and maps), but it certainly wasn’t designed as a tool for drawing pictures. Being forced to play by Datawrapper’s rules means coming up with increasingly unintuitive ways of transforming an image into a Datawrapper-friendly dataset.

Using peaks, troughs and “baselines” in a line graph to represent different monochromes tones, Elana recreated a photo of Natalie Portman and it looks so good.

And here’s the equation for each line on the graph:

y = y0 + amplitudeMax * (1 - brightness) * Math.sin(x*frequency)

If you want to try it yourself, check out Elana’s ChARTify tool.