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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Watercolor bar chart, light theme: Translucent washes with pooled edges on cold-press paper, with pencil guides.

Watercolor

LightBar

Translucent washes with pooled edges on cold-press paper, with pencil guides.

  • Paper#FBF8F1
  • Ultramarine#3E5C9A
  • Gold Ochre#D4952B
  • Sepia#5B4636
  • Pencil#9A948C

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 "Watercolor" 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 botanical sketchbook page. Marks are translucent watercolor washes on textured cold-press paper, ruled with a light pencil and titled in an elegant italic serif.

Colors (use these exact values):
- Paper: #FBF8F1, with a cold-press texture: feTurbulence (fractalNoise, baseFrequency 0.045, 4 octaves) fed into feDiffuseLighting (surfaceScale 2.2, distant light azimuth 235, elevation 58), desaturated, multiplied over the paper at 30% opacity.
- Pigment 1, Ultramarine: #3E5C9A, for the main series.
- Pigment 2, Gold Ochre: #D4952B, for the highlighted category or second series. Label text for it in a darker ochre #9A6512 so it stays legible.
- Sepia: #5B4636 for the title, category labels and baseline. Subtitle #7A6A5C, source line #8C7D70.
- Pencil: #9A948C for guide lines and axis numbers.
- Optional ground wash: sap green #7C9A5A at 28% under the baseline, heavily blurred (see bleed below).

Typography (Google Fonts): Cormorant Garamond only.
- Title 46px italic 600 in Sepia. Paint a Gold Ochre swash behind the key word of the title (a rounded rectangle about 28px tall, run through the bleed filter, 40% opacity, multiply).
- Subtitle 21px 500. Value labels above bars 24px 700 in the pigment's color. Category labels 19px italic 600. Axis numbers 17px italic 500 in Pencil. Source line 16px italic 500.

Axes and grid:
- No axis lines except a thin 1.2px Sepia baseline at 75% opacity. Horizontal pencil guide lines (0.9px, Pencil color) at a few round values, each ruled a touch off-level and not quite full length, roughened with a grain mask (feTurbulence baseFrequency 1.2 thresholded into alpha) so they read as graphite.

Marks (this is what sells the style):
- Wash: fill each mark with a vertical gradient of its pigment from 22% opacity at the top to 36% at the middle and 50% at the bottom (add 12 points to each stop for Gold Ochre, a paler pigment). Group the marks, set mix-blend-mode: multiply, and apply one filter (color-interpolation-filters sRGB) that: displaces the edges with low-frequency noise (fractalNoise 0.022, 3 octaves, displacement scale 9); blurs 0.9px; mottles the interior with a second noise (fractalNoise 0.11) mapped to alpha 0.9*a + 0.5; and adds a pooled darker rim by subtracting a thresholded, 2.5px-eroded, 1.8px-blurred copy of the shape from itself and boosting that rim's alpha 2.2x.
- Glaze: over each wash lay a second, slightly narrower layer of the same pigment at 30% opacity whose top sits 6 to 14px below the first, through a filter that displaces it (scale 10), blurs 1.2px and masks it with blotchy low-frequency noise (fractalNoise 0.04, alpha 2.4*a - 0.6), so a lighter band and a hard-edged bloom show where layers differ.
- Bar chart: square-ended bars about 70% of the band width, bottoms on the baseline. Value above each bar, category name below in italic.
- Line chart: draw each series as a 6px round-capped stroke with the same wash filter, plus a soft area wash under the line (the gradient above at half strength, through the bleed filter). Mark points with small 5px pigment dabs.
- Bleed filter for soft washes: displacement scale 18 from fractalNoise 0.03, then a 3px blur.
- Optionally flick two or three tiny Gold Ochre drops (2 to 5px) in an empty corner, run through the glaze filter.

Avoid: opaque flat fills, hard vector edges, black, gridlines darker than pencil, sans-serif type, drop shadows, and more than two pigments for data.

When you're done, render the chart and zoom in: the marks should be see-through with visibly darker edges, the paper texture should show inside the washes, the glaze must not read as a separate stacked segment, and every label must stay legible over the texture.