About Engineer Dad Data

Engineer Dad Data makes animated data charts about engineering, technology, and science — designed for the vertical phone screen and built to stop people mid-scroll.

The first chart — an animated bar chart race of every object launched into space by country, from 1958 to the present — got 14,300 views on Instagram. That was enough to keep going.

Why portrait format?

Because that's how people hold their phones. Landscape charts are beautiful on a desktop and invisible on a Reel. Every chart here is built for 1080×1920 — the native format of Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok. The data has to work in that shape or it doesn't get made.

The brand

The goggles with kids in the lenses are the logo. Engineer Dad is a working engineer who also has kids. The charts are the kind of thing you explain to your kids on a Sunday morning, or share with a colleague who asks "hey, did you know how much chip costs have fallen?"

The data

Every chart uses publicly available data — IAEA, EPA, IAEA PRIS, company annual reports, IC Insights, EV-Volumes, TOP500.org. Sources are listed on each chart page. The data is as accurate as I can make it; where estimates are used, they're noted.

How it's built

All charts are generated in Python using matplotlib and ffmpeg. No After Effects, no Flourish, no external animation tools. The code lives in a private repo and outputs MP4 files at exactly 1080×1920 for direct upload to the platforms.

Contact

For sponsorship, data corrections, or just to say the Concorde one made you nostalgic: jeff@engineerdaddata.com