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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Field Notebook line chart, light theme: A dotted-grid page with pencil gridlines, an inked line, notes and a stamp.

Field Notebook

LightLine

A dotted-grid page with pencil gridlines, an inked line, notes and a stamp.

  • Page#F6F0E1
  • Pen ink#1F2A44
  • Graphite#6E6A64
  • Stamp#B23A35
  • Washi#7FB5A8

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 "Field Notebook" 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 naturalist's field notebook. The chart was plotted by hand in the field: pencil scaffolding, observations inked over it with a fine pen, notes scribbled in the margins, a rubber stamp and a strip of tape holding it all together.

Colors (use these exact values):
- Page: #F6F0E1 (cream notebook paper) with a dotted grid: 1.15px-radius #BDB4A2 dots every 20px.
- Pen ink (the main series, its markers, the title, notes, arrows): #1F2A44, a blue-black fountain-pen ink.
- Graphite pencil (gridlines, axes, ticks, tick labels, subtitle, a comparison series, the source): #6E6A64.
- Rubber stamp: #B23A35 at about 80% opacity, faded and patchy.
- Washi tape: #7FB5A8 with translucent white diagonal stripes.

Typography (Google Fonts):
- Caveat for all handwriting: title 700 at 44px in ink stating the finding; subtitle 400 at 24px in pencil, lowercase, stating measure and unit; tick labels 21px in pencil; month or category labels 700 at 23px in pencil; notes 22 to 26px in ink (700 for the key phrase, 400 for the aside); legend 23px; source 20px in pencil.
- Special Elite (typewriter face) only inside the rubber stamp, uppercase, 15 to 19px, 1 to 1.5px letter-spacing.

Layout:
- Title top left at about x 64, subtitle under it. The plot fills the middle of the page. Source bottom left, lowercase ("source: illustrative data"), optionally followed by the arithmetic behind the title.
- A soft binding shadow down the left edge: a 34px gradient from #8A7A5C at 35% to transparent.
- The stamp sits at a slight angle (-7 degrees) in the emptiest part of the plot, like it was stamped after the page was drawn: a 206 x 78 px double rectangle (3.2px outer with 6px radius, 1.2px inner) with two lines of text and a rule between them.
- The washi tape crosses one corner at about 34 degrees, 44px wide, with torn zigzag ends, partly off the canvas.

Axes and grid:
- Pencil gridlines: 1px dashed (7 on, 5 off) at 55% opacity, starting and ending a few pixels unevenly. Axes are single 1.6px pencil strokes that bow very slightly (draw them as gentle quadratic curves, not rulers). Short 1.4px tick dashes.
- Run every pencil mark through a graphite filter: feTurbulence (fractalNoise, baseFrequency 0.9, 2 octaves) into feDisplacementMap at scale 1.6, then mask the result with the same noise (alpha = 2.2 * noise - 0.55) so the strokes look grainy and broken.

Marks:
- Line chart: the main series as a 2.6px ink line through a monotone smooth curve, with a small hand-drawn circle (r about 6, 1.5px ink, filled with the page color) at every observation. Draw each circle as a jittered polyline that overshoots its start by about 20 degrees, so no two are identical. A comparison series goes in pencil: 1.8px dashed (9 on, 6 off) with small x marks at the observations. Wobble all ink with feTurbulence (baseFrequency 0.035) and feDisplacementMap at scale 2.4.
- Bar chart: bars drawn as ink outlines (2px, slightly wobbly via the same filter) filled with loose pencil hatching at 45 degrees, the highlighted bar filled with denser ink hatching. Values written above the bars in Caveat.

Labels and annotation:
- Legend written by hand at the top of the plot: a short sample of each mark followed by "2025, ink" and "2024, pencil" style labels.
- Two or three margin notes in ink ("first juveniles!", "peak: 38 / hr") with curved pen arrows (1.5px, open chevron heads) pointing at the exact observation. Place them in clear space so they never cross the line.

Texture: a faint paper grain from fractalNoise (baseFrequency 0.75) at about 28% alpha over the page.

Avoid: straight ruler-perfect lines, digital sans-serif type, bright or saturated colors beyond the stamp and tape, drop shadows on data, gradients inside marks, and a boxed legend.

When you're done, render the chart and check that the pencil still reads at thumbnail size, the notes and stamp never cover data, the circles look hand-drawn rather than perfect, and the title's claim matches the numbers.