文 / 王不留（微信公众号：王不留）

Our team often gets asked how we create The Economist’s charts—is there one specific tool we use? As much as we wish there was a magic bullet—a single program that could do all the things we need—we haven’t found it yet. Instead, we rely on a variety of tools to produce our static charts. From The Economist’s own charting tool to open-source packages to Adobe Illustrator—these are the data-vis tools that our team uses regularly.

As much as 多达

magic bullet 灵丹妙药

大家常常问我们团队是如何创建《经济学人》图表的 — 是不是使用了特定工具？尽管我们希望有一幅灵丹妙药 — 一个可以完成我们需要的所有事情的程序 — 但我们还没有发现它。相反，我们依赖多种的工具生成静态图表。从经济学人自己的图表工具到开源软件包到Adobe Illustrator — 这些都是我们团队经常使用的数据可视化工具。

Silver Bullet

银弹

Although we don’t have a magic bullet, we have tried to create one: Silver Bullet—or “Sibyl” as we have dubbed it—is our in-house charting tool which we use to create charts in The Economist’s style. The majority of our regular print charts start out in Sibyl. It’s easy to use, applies a consistent style and saves us time. As soon as we paste our data into the Google Sheets template (watching out for those pesky date formats!), Sibyl builds a line or bar chart. We can then edit parameters such as the scales, labels and the size and type of the chart. Finally, when we’re happy with the result we export it as an SVG, a vector-based image that allows us to refine the chart in Illustrator.

Dub 把……称之为……

Start out 从……开始

虽然我们没有灵丹妙药，我们已经尝试创造了一个：银弹 或 我们称之为“Sibyl” ，是我们的内部图表工具，我们用它制作经济学人风格的图表。我们大多数常规印刷版图表是从Sibyl开始的。它易于使用，风格一致，节省时间。我们将数据粘贴到Google Sheets模板（小心那些讨厌的日期格式），Sibyl就建立一个折线图或条形图。然后我们可以编辑参数，比如比例，标签和图表的大小和类型。最后，当我们满意结果后，将其导出成SVG格式，一种基于矢量的图像，允许我们在Illustrator中优化图表。

QGIS

We only started using QGIS, a freely available mapping package, regularly in 2016 but it has since become a mainstay in our toolkit. Gone are the days of adding labels by hand or colouring a world map one country at a time. Now we can source the data in a GIS (geographic information system) format and add them to an editable base map. Using QGIS has improved our work significantly: our maps are now more precise and take a fraction of the time to create, which means we can spend more time fine-tuning the details.

At a time 每次

Mainstay 支柱；中流砥柱

Base map 底图

Fine-tuning 对……微调

我们从2016年开始定期使用QGIS，这是一个免费提供的地图包，但在我们的工具包中已成为中流砥柱。手工添加标签或者一次为世界地图的一个国家/地区着色的日子已经一去不复返了。现在我们可以获取GIS（地图信息系统）格式数据，并将它们添加到可编辑的底图中。使用QGIS显著改进了我们的工作：我们的地图现在更加精确，而且只需要一小部分时间来创建，这意味着我们可以花费更多时间微调细节。

R and ggplot2

For the more complex print charts that feature in our Graphic detail section we often use R, an open-source statistical program. An R package for data visualisations called “ggplot2” offers a wide range of chart types and has many options more complex than Silver Bullet. Using R we can easily add in regressions, which comes in handy especially for polling charts (see example below). It is also easy to update or replace data—you just have to add or change a line of code. This is an advantage not only when working with data that are still in a state of flux, but it also enables us to visually explore a dataset and test which chart type might work best.

Handy 好用的

a state of flux 不断变化的状态

Visually 在视觉上地，真实地，直观地

对于更复杂的印刷版图表，在我们的图形细节部分，我们经常使用R语言（一种开源的统计程序）。用于数据可视化的R包叫“ggplot2”,它提供广泛的图表类型，并且有许多比银弹更复杂的选项。使用R语言，我们可以轻松地添加回归，这对投票图表尤为好用。以制作特别好用图表。更新或替换数据也很容易 — 你只需要添加或修改一行代码。这不仅在处理仍处于不断变化状态的数据时是一个优势，而且还使我们能够直观地浏览数据集并测试哪种图表类型可能最有效。

RAWGraphs

For some of the more esoteric charts we head over to RAWGraphs. Although it doesn’t offer the same flexibility as R, no coding skills are required—you simply paste the data into the window and select the chart type you want to use. Because it is more limited than R, we tend to use it when we know exactly how we want to visualise the data and the chart type isn’t an option in Sibyl, such as the sankey diagram below.

esoteric 只有内行才懂的；难领略的

对于一些更理深奥的图表，我们转向RAWGraphs。虽然它没有提供与R语言相同的灵活性，但是不需要编码技能— 你只需要将数据粘贴到窗口中，选择你要使用的图表类型即可。因为这比R语言更有限，所以当我们确切知道如何可视化数据并且图表类型不是Sibyl工具中的一个选项时，我们倾向于使用它，比如下面的sankey图表。

Adobe Illustrator

Once we have created a map or chart with any of the tools above, we use Illustrator to apply the finishing touches, from changing default colours to repositioning labels to adding the all-important annotation layer.

All-important 极重要的

一旦我们使用上面的任何工具创建了一张地图或图表，我们将使用Illustrator进行最后润色，从更改默认颜色到重新定位标签，再到添加最重要的注释层。

But the most important reason for using Illustrator is this: no two charts are ever quite the same. Although our chart-making tools are great for plotting data in The Economist’s style and in some cases do most of the heavy lifting for us, Illustrator allows us to make subtle changes that can make all the difference.

plot 密谋；绘制

In some cases 在某些情况下；有时候

但使用Illustrator的最重要原因是：没有两个图表是完全相同的。尽管我们图表制作工具非常适合以《经济学人》的风格绘制数据，而且在某些情况下，Illustrator为我们完成了大部分繁重的工作，但是Illustrator允许我们做出细微改变，从而产生完全不同的效果。

Honourable mentions

荣誉提名

D3

Adobe PhotoshopColour OracleMapShaperProjection WizardFlourishA pen(cil) and paper

“王不留说”

《经济学人》的分析图表是行业顶级标杆，权威严谨，风格突出，是各大商业媒体、可视化专家们关注和学习的对象。

它的图表，固然来自专业的工具，但更多是由最后人工的精修加工。

我们也可以学其风格，为自己的工作图表或者论文插图加分。