Flourish

About

Flourish

Flourish is a data visualisation and storytelling platform founded in London in 2017 by Kiln, a data-visualisation studio led by Duncan Clark and Robin Houston. The product was acquired by Canva in December 2022 and continues to operate under the Flourish brand. Flourish offers free public projects alongside paid team plans, and specialises in narrative-driven interactive charts, animated bar-chart races, geographic maps, and embeddable story slides used by newsrooms and marketing teams.

Flourish was launched in 2017 in London by Kiln, a data-visualisation and interactive-storytelling studio founded by Duncan Clark and Robin Houston. Clark, a journalist and author who had previously covered data at The Guardian, and Houston, a technical lead with a background in interactive graphics, set out to build a tool that would let non-programmer journalists, communicators, and marketers create the kind of animated, narrative-driven charts that data desks at major newspapers had until then only been able to produce through custom code. Flourish grew rapidly inside newsrooms and non-profit communications teams during 2018 and 2019, and in December 2022 Australian design platform Canva acquired the company for an undisclosed sum. Flourish continues to operate under its original name and domain and remains available both as a standalone product and inside Canva's expanded creative suite. The product is organised around chart templates rather than a general-purpose chart engine. Users pick a template, upload data as CSV or connect to a live spreadsheet, and configure the visualisation through a form-based settings panel. Templates cover bar-chart races, treemaps, sankey diagrams, scatter plots with running animations, line-and-area charts, geographic maps with choropleth or bubble overlays, election-result maps, hierarchy trees, sports league tables, and dozens of other formats designed to be self-contained embeddable stories. Advanced users can write custom templates in Svelte or edit template code directly, and the Story feature stitches multiple visualisations into a stepped presentation with scroll-linked narrative text. Flourish is distributed through flourish.studio with a free tier that publishes public projects to the flourish.studio domain, and paid Personal, Business, and Enterprise plans that unlock private projects, custom domains, brand kits, and priority support. Community channels include the Flourish YouTube channel, the flourish.studio Twitter presence, an Instagram gallery of noteworthy user stories, and a large user showcase featuring work by newsrooms including The Guardian, Reuters, The Economist, Bloomberg, and Al Jazeera.