Bell Curve with “You Are Here”
The canonical normal distribution with a personal percentile marker that scrolls into place as the reader arrives.
A free, animated bell curve with “you are here” you can read here or embed on any website, from Scrollchart.
A bell curve is the visual form of the normal (Gaussian) distribution. The smooth, symmetric hump shows where most values concentrate (near the mean) and how quickly they thin out in both directions (determined by the standard deviation). The vertical reference marker shows where a single value of interest falls relative to the rest of the population, with a percentile callout to translate position into probability.
The normal distribution appears throughout science and measurement because of the Central Limit Theorem: the average of many independent random variables converges to a normal distribution regardless of the original distribution. IQ scores are standardized to mean 100, standard deviation 15. A score of 115 falls at the +1 sigma mark and sits at roughly the 84th percentile.
The peak of the curve is the mean. From the mean, each step of one standard deviation along the X-axis covers a predictable fraction of the population: the band from mean minus 1 sigma to mean plus 1 sigma contains approximately 68% of all values. Within 2 sigma contains roughly 95%. Within 3 sigma contains roughly 99.7%. The vertical reference line marks a specific value. The percentile callout shows the area under the curve to the left of that marker: if it reads 84%, then 84% of the population falls below that value and 16% falls above it. Percentile communicates rarity directly: a value at the 99.9th percentile is exceeded by fewer than 1 in 1000 people.
Good for
- Personal-finance writers showing where a saver sits
- Fitness coaches plotting client metrics
- Health journalists explaining test-result interpretation
Source & accuracy
Synthetic distribution; you can pass any μ, σ, and personal value.
Frequently asked questions
- Where can I get a free animated "Bell Curve with “You Are Here”" for my website?
- Scrollchart provides "Bell Curve with “You Are Here”" as a free, embeddable animated diagram you can add to any website with one line of HTML. No signup is required and there is no watermark. The diagram and its explainer text are served from scrollchart.com, so the embed stays current without any maintenance on your end.
- How do I embed a bell curve with “you are here” in a blog post or article?
- Paste the one-line HTML snippet from the Scrollchart diagram page into your post editor. It works in WordPress, Webflow, Ghost, and plain HTML with no plugin required. The animated diagram and its explainer text load from scrollchart.com and render directly in your page DOM.
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