Chart Prompts

1,337 ways to dress a line or bar chart, 669 light and 668 dark. Open any chart to see it full size and copy a prompt that gives your own chart the same look.

Every chart uses illustrative data. The prompts work with any coding agent and any charting library; they describe colors, type, spacing and marks precisely enough to reproduce each look.

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Victorian Almanac bar chart, light theme: Foxed sepia paper, a scrolled cartouche and hand-tinted, engraved bars.

Victorian Almanac

LightBar

Foxed sepia paper, a scrolled cartouche and hand-tinted, engraved bars.

  • Paper#EFE2C6
  • Sepia ink#3B2A1A
  • Ochre#C8963E
  • Faded blue#6F8CA3
  • Brick#A4452C

Prompt for your coding agent

Paste it with your chart's code. It restyles your data to match this chart.

Restyle my chart in the "Victorian Almanac" style described below. Keep my data, chart type, title meaning and units; change only the presentation. Use the charting library this project already uses (plain SVG if there is none). If the library can't express a detail, draw it in a custom layer instead of dropping it. Measurements assume a 960 x 600 chart; scale them proportionally.

Mood: a plate from a 19th-century statistical atlas. Copperplate engraving on aged rag paper, hand-tinted with watercolor, framed and titled with ceremony.

Colors (use these exact values):
- Paper: #EFE2C6, darkened toward the edges by a radial vignette (transparent at 55% of the radius, #9C7A48 at 42% opacity at the corners).
- Sepia ink for all type, rules, outlines and hatching: #3B2A1A. Never pure black.
- Hand-tinted washes, in this order: #C8963E (ochre, the main or latest series), #6F8CA3 (faded blue, the earlier or comparison series), #A4452C (brick, reserved for the one item the finding is about, and for the finding line itself).
- Panels (cartouche, key box): #EFE3C8, slightly lighter than the paper.

Typography (Google Fonts):
- IM Fell English SC for the cartouche title (30px, 1px letter-spacing, title case so the small caps show), category labels (18px), the key heading (17px, 1.5px letter-spacing) and the source line (14px, 2px letter-spacing).
- IM Fell English for everything else: cartouche subtitle italic 18px stating measure and unit in period phrasing ("In Millions of Tons, for the Years 1860 and 1880"); the finding in italic 19px brick red centered under the cartouche, phrased like the period ("Wherein it is shewn that ..."); scale numerals 17px; value labels 16px (comparison series 14px italic); axis caption italic 15px ("Scale of Millions of Tons").

Layout:
- Double border: a 2.6px outer rule inset 18px and a 0.8px inner rule 7px inside it, with a small diamond rosette (14px square rotated 45 degrees, paper-filled, with a 2.4px ink dot) on each inner corner.
- Cartouche centered at the top, about 530 x 82 px: a rectangle with concave quarter-circle corners (radius 14), 1.8px outline, and a 0.7px inner frame 6px inside it (corner radius 10). From each side, a scrolled flourish (a curl ending in a small spiral) and a 0.7px rule run out toward the border, finished with a small ink lozenge.
- The finding line sits about 28px below the cartouche; the plate starts about 26px below that. Source line centered at the bottom inside the border.
- The key, titled "Explanation" with a short rule under the heading, sits in a double-ruled box in an empty region of the plate.

Axes and grid:
- The plate is closed by 1.1px ink rules at top and bottom and a 1.4px ink rule along the value axis origin. Gridlines every major step are 0.7px ink at 55% opacity; half-steps are 0.5px dotted (1.5 on, 3 off).
- Thin 0.5px rules at 45% opacity separate the category rows across the full plate width, including under the labels.
- Scale numerals in oldstyle figures under the plate, with an italic caption naming the unit.

Marks:
- Bar chart: horizontal bars, square ends, every bar outlined 0.9px in ink. The earlier series: a #6F8CA3 wash at 32% opacity under a diagonal engraved hatch (1.5px #6F8CA3 lines on a 4px pitch at 45 degrees). The main series: a #C8963E wash at 85% opacity under a fine ink hatch the other way (0.6px, 5px pitch, -45 degrees, 55% opacity). The highlighted item: #A4452C wash under an ink cross-hatch (4px pitch). Pairs of bars sit close (2px apart) with the value at the end of each bar.
- Line chart: 1.6px ink lines with small engraved markers (open circles r 3.5, 1px ink) at each point; fill the area under each line with its wash at 30% and the engraved hatch, and letter the series name along the line in italic.
- Washes should look hand-applied: roughen their edges with feTurbulence (fractalNoise, baseFrequency "0.06 0.25", 3 octaves) plus feDisplacementMap at scale 3.5, and knock a little of the pigment out with the same noise so the tint pools unevenly. Keep the ink outline crisp on top.

Texture:
- Foxing: sparse rust-brown spots from feTurbulence (fractalNoise, baseFrequency 0.035, 4 octaves) thresholded through an alpha matrix, softened with a 1.1px blur, at about 42% opacity.
- Mottling: very low-frequency noise (baseFrequency 0.007) as soft tonal variation at 35%, plus fine ink specks (baseFrequency 0.22, hard threshold) at 30% and a fine grain layer over everything.

Avoid: sans-serif type, pure black, saturated or bright colors, gradients inside bars, rounded corners, drop shadows, modern flat design, and clean untextured paper.

When you're done, render the chart and check that the hatching reads at thumbnail size, the foxing is sparse enough not to fight the data, the finding line is arithmetically true, and no label crosses a bar or the border.