Origins of TernaryPlot.com
Well, if you're wondering:
Initially, I (Jules Blom) built this as a small tool for myself to quickly make many ternary plots and avoid having to work with janky Excel templates or dealing with MATLAB (or Python or R for that matter).
It was a nice exercise in programming and making an app. I learned a lot and enjoyed doing it.
It was (still is) nice to know I built something useful.
This was all the way back in 2018 during my studies.
Later on, after my studies, I built it into a user-friendly website. Then that actually attracted users and even donations from those users.
I completely rebuilt it to improve it in 2021. I noticed more people using it and saw it mentioned in quite a few papers. And now in 2025, I rebuilt it again. This time well enough to charge money for it.
TernaryPlot.com is powered by d3-ternary, an open-source JavaScript library I wrote for creating ternary plots with D3.js. The library handles all the coordinate transformations and mathematical operations needed to render ternary diagrams.
If you're a developer interested in building your own ternary plot visualizations, check out:
- d3-ternary on GitHub: The library source code (MIT license)
- Introducing d3-ternary: An interactive Observable notebook demonstrating how to use the library