As a warm up to larger generative art project I have been working on, I created this randomly generated unicode pattern viz in Tableau.
This viz randomly selects unicode symbols to form random patterns. The viz changes every time you view it as new random numbers are generated. Some caching issues may slow the refresh rate. The symbol themselves actually represent the top 500 products sold in the super store sales data set.
This post was inspired by this article on unicode patterns by Yuan Chuan. Thank you.
After I saw the new ggrough package using rough.js I wanted to add sketchy bars in Tableau. This is a similar concept using rough hatch fill patterns for bars in Tableau. This uses the same technique of creating pattern fill charts described in this post.
I recently posted about using fill patterns as a tertiary data encoding option in Tableau. By that I mean fill patterns can be used to communicate the third most important message in a chart. In this case the 1st most important message is sales by store. The 2nd most important is region. And the 3rd most important is whether the store is new or not. This is the least important message to communicate in the chart.
Here are a few other options to show tertiary data encodings on bar charts. UPDATED: Added the label dot option thanks to Steve Wexler's suggestion.
One Tableau feature I have seen requested in the forums is the ability to fill bar charts with patterns. It is a commonly used feature in Excel. And it is a nice way to communicate a tertiary value in addition to color. Here is a hack. This chart shows Super Store sales by store, colored by region and a fill pattern indicating new stores.
Essentially I'm creating two sets of bars: one non-transparent (old stores) and one transparent (new) where you want the pattern bar. Then I add a custom patterned background image that is visible through the transparent bars.
To create this take the following steps:
div#ContactForm1 {
display: none !important;
}