Introducing Coördinator: A new open source project made at Spotify to inject some whimsy into data visualizations

This post introduces Coördinator, an open-source tool developed at Spotify. It details the motivation behind its creation, stemming from a need to visualize Dita Von Teese's listening data by transforming her SVG portrait into thousands of dots. The technical implementation relies on SVG's getTotalLength() and getPointAtLength() methods, augmented by the Pathologist library to support various SVG shapes. The post highlights Coördinator's ability to handle multiple paths and shapes, its visual editing interface for precise control over dot placement and scaling, and its utility for both data-driven visualizations and purely aesthetic dot animations. Examples are provided for using the tool with Olympic data, a 3D bunny, and even for carving pumpkins.