Flourish Company Examples

Flourish is a data visualisation and storytelling platform that was created to make it easy to author rich, animated and interactive visualisations without needing specialist programming knowledge. I started working with the company in 2017, and in the time since then I've seen the company grow from a small team through to acquisition by Canva in 2021, followed by their integration with a large international organisation. I currently work as a Tech Lead for the templates team, where we're responsible for creating and maintaining the site's visualisations.

Lately I've been responsible for the long-term maintenance and health of the visualisation code. This has included developing innovative testing solutions for our visualizations and establishing best practices for testing within our team, in a domain that typically lacks the clear testing standards found in traditional web development. It's also involved the creation and management of a CI/CD pipeline for an ever-increasing number of projects to ensure we can release quickly and safely.

One major project has been our map templates for the visualisation of geospatial data, which are built on top of Mapbox GL JS and include a custom WebGL layer for rendering large numbers of animated points and heatmaps using regl.

Other projects have included a 3D model viewer, video export functionality, our 3D Globe template that complements our map templates, a responsive annotation system, and early explorations for the integration of Flourish and Canva.