What is picasso.js?

picasso.js is an open source charting library that’s designed for building custom, interactive, component-based powerful visualizations.

Components

Components are the visual building blocks that make up the chart, by combining them in various forms virtually any chart can be created. A bar chart, for example, consists of a bar layer, a continuous and a discrete axis. Add a line layer and you have a combo chart. Want a line chart with four axes? - Not a problem.

Extensible

picasso.js provides a plugin system that makes it easy to extend existing capabilities - you can register and use custom components that play well with the existing ones, create a new theme, provide your own data parser or even register a custom renderer that outputs sketchy graphics. picasso.js uses D3.js for a lot of its features and strives to provide the D3 community with a way to repurpose and easily integrate their work into picasso.js.

Interactive

Apart from basic interaction patterns, interactivity in the form of brushing and linking is provided out of the box - drag a range on a linear axis to highlight all values that fall within that range, or use the lasso tool to highlight a cluster of points. The brushed values can then programmatically be linked and highlighted in another chart instance.

Responsive

By using relative units and a unique layout algorithm you can ensure the composed charts are responsive. The same configuration can be used for a full sized chart containing details, annotations etc., as for a sparkline version - components are automatically resized or removed if they don’t fit.

Themeable

The visual look of labels, lines, shapes, color palettes etc. can all be modified and a new theme created by just changing a few base variables that control the look and feel throughout, including plugins.