carlo.im

What It Is

Carlo.im is the personal homepage and data visualization portfolio of Carlo Zapponi. According to the site, he currently works on data visualization at Cisco’s AI Cloud Team, previously contributed to The Guardian’s Visual Desk, and has experience at Microsoft, Nokia, frog design, and others. The site is not centered on selling a product; instead, it showcases his long-running work in news graphics, interactive storytelling, and visualization.

Core Features

The site opens with a concise personal introduction and lists a large number of visualization projects, covering topics such as elections, Brexit, the pandemic, air pollution, sports events, global warming, imports and exports, and social data. It also provides links to GitHub, The Guardian project pages, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, and email, making it easy to view the author’s code, media work, and professional profile. The page also notes that he is the creator of chrt, a free, open-source JavaScript charting library designed to lower the barrier to creating charts.

Pricing

The page does not show any paid plans, consulting rates, or subscription models, and the site is generally free to access. chrt is explicitly described as free and open-source, so the site is better understood as a portfolio and professional profile rather than a commercial service entry point.

Pros and Cons

The main strengths are its clear professional focus and the wide range of project topics, spanning newsroom use cases, data storytelling, and interactive experiments. The author’s background also adds strong credibility to the work. For designers, news visualization teams, and frontend developers, it is a useful source of inspiration.

The downside is that the information on the page is relatively lightweight. It lacks detailed explanations for each project, including methodology, tech stack, data sources, and production retrospectives. There is also no Chinese interface, collaboration guidance, or commercial service workflow, so users looking to directly purchase a tool or find standardized services may find the information incomplete.

Who It’s For

Best suited for data visualization designers, interactive news editors, frontend chart developers, portfolio researchers, and organizations or individuals who want to understand the author’s background and potentially initiate collaboration. It is not suitable as an off-the-shelf BI tool or online chart-making platform.

Access from China

The main site, carlo.im, may be directly accessible, but linked services such as X/Twitter, LinkedIn, some external media sites, or code platforms may be unstable or restricted in mainland China. Overall, access is therefore assessed as “partially restricted.”