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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Letterpress line chart, light theme: Two inks pressed deep into cotton stock, with blind-debossed gridlines.

Letterpress

LightLine

Two inks pressed deep into cotton stock, with blind-debossed gridlines.

  • Cotton paper#F4EFE4
  • Navy ink#1F2F4F
  • Brick red ink#B23A2E

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 "Letterpress" 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 small private press printing on thick cotton stock. Two inks, pressed hard enough that every mark sits in a shallow bite in the paper. Warm, tactile and exact, never distressed.

Colors (use these exact values):
- Paper: #F4EFE4 (warm cotton white) for the whole canvas, with a faint grain (fractal noise, base frequency 0.7, 3 octaves, tinted warm brown, about 25% visible) and very faint horizontal fibers.
- Ink one: #1F2F4F (navy) for the title, text, axes and the historical part of the data.
- Ink two: #B23A2E (brick red) for the eyebrow, the ornament, the highlighted final stretch of the data and its labels, and the colophon line.
- No tints, no transparency on inks: letterpress only has solid ink or bare paper. Gridlines are blind impressions (no ink): a 1px #5A4E3A line at 22% opacity 0.6px above a 1px #FFFFFF line at 85% opacity 0.6px below.

Typography (Google Fonts):
- Alfa Slab One for the title (36px, navy, sentence case, states the finding) and for key numbers on the chart (20px for a secondary callout, 30px for the headline value, in red).
- Crimson Pro for everything else: eyebrow 600 14px uppercase with 3.2px letter-spacing in red; subtitle italic 19px navy with measure, unit and period; axis labels 500 17 to 18px navy (highlighted years 700 in red); annotations italic 16 to 17px navy; source italic 15px; colophon 600 12px uppercase with 2.4px letter-spacing in red.

Layout:
- 64px side margins. Eyebrow at y 76, title at y 122, then the printer's ornament rule at y 146, subtitle at y 180, chart from about y 232 to 486, a 1.2px navy rule at y 540, and a footer at y 566 with the source left and "PRINTED IN TWO INKS ON COTTON STOCK" right.
- The ornament rule: a 2px navy rule with a 0.9px navy rule 4px under it, broken in the middle (58px gap) for a red lozenge (28 x 14px) flanked by two red dots (r 2.4) 22px from its center.
- A blind-debossed frame (no ink) 25px inside the canvas edge, drawn as a shadowed and a lit 1.2px rectangle offset by 1.2px.

Axes and grid:
- Four blind gridlines, no y-axis line. Y labels right-aligned 16px left of the plot.
- A 2.4px navy baseline with 1.6 x 7px navy ticks under the labeled years; year labels 30px below the baseline.

Marks:
- Line chart: straight segments. The history is a 4px navy line with round joins and 3.2px navy dots at each point. The final stretch you want to highlight is a 5px red line; its start point is an open circle (r 6, paper fill, 2.6px red stroke) and its end point a solid red dot (r 7.5). Label both ends: the value in Alfa Slab One red with a short italic navy caption beneath it, kept clear of the line.
- Bar chart: solid navy square-cornered bars about 55% of the band, the highlighted bars (latest period or the focus group) in solid red, value labels in Alfa Slab One above each bar in the bar's ink, a 2.4px navy baseline.

Texture and effects (the press impression, applied to every inked element as one filter):
- Ink gain: dilate the ink by 0.35px, then displace it with fractal noise (base frequency 0.9, 2 octaves) at scale 1.4 so edges are very slightly irregular.
- Deboss: an inner shadow inside each mark's top-left edge (blur the alpha 1.1px, offset it 1.2px right and 1.6px down, keep the part of the original not covered, fill #0B1120 at 80%) and a thin lit lip outside its bottom-right edge (the alpha offset 0.8px right and 1px down, minus the original, filled white at 70%).

Avoid: gradients, drop shadows that lift marks off the page, more than two inks, halftones or opacity-based tints, rounded bars, glossy effects, and heavy grunge. The impression should be felt, not noticed.

When you're done, render the chart and check that only navy and red ink appear, the gridlines read as pressed grooves rather than gray lines, the highlighted stretch and its labels are red and do not collide with the line, and the title's claim is arithmetically true.