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Chart Best Practices
using light borders or simply white space to set apart elements of the table. Make the data stands out more than the structural components of the table.
Borders should be used to improve the legibility of your table. Think about pushing them to the background by making them grey, or getting rid of them altogether. The data should be what stands out, not the borders.
One approach for mixing the detail you can include in a table while also making use of visual cues is via a heatmap. you leverage colored cells that convey the relative magnitude of the numbers.
To reduce this mental processing, we can use color saturation and contrast to provide visual cues, helping our eyes and brains more quickly target the potential points of interest. If you want your audience to focus on big‐picture trends, think about preserving the axis but deemphasizing it by making it grey.
If the specific numerical values are important, it may be better to label the data points directly. it’s usually best to omit the axis to avoid the inclusion of redundant information.
Scatterplot
Scatterplots can be useful for showing the relationship between two things, because they allow you to encode data simultaneously on a horizontal x‐axis and vertical y‐axis to see whether and what relation- ship exists. They tend to be more frequently used in scientific fields (and perhaps, because of this, are sometimes viewed as complicated to understand by those less familiar with them).
Linechart
when you’re graphing time on the horizontal x‐axis of a line graph, the data plotted must be in consistent intervals.
Slopegraph
Slopegraphs can be useful when you have two time periods or points of comparison and want to quickly show relative increases and decreases or differences across various categories between the two data points.
Bar Chart
While lines work well to show data over time, bars tend to be my go‐to graph type for plotting categorical data, where information is organized into groups. it is important that bar charts always have a zero baseline. Spacing: There’s no hard‐and‐fast rule here, but in general the bars should be wider than the white space between the bars.
Waterfall chart
The waterfall chart can be used to pull apart the pieces of a stacked bar chart to focus on one at a time, or to show a starting point, increases and decreases, and the resulting ending point.
Horizontal bar chart
The horizontal bar chart is especially useful if your category names are long.
Logical ordering of categories:
- Keep the categories in numerical order.If the biggest category is the most important, think about putting that first and ordering the rest of the categories in decreasing numerical order.
Stacked horizontal bar chart
Can be structured to show either absolute values or sum to 100%. work well for visualizing survey data collected along a Likert scale
Secondary y‐axis:
generally not a good ideas, but there are couple of ways to work around :
Data Visualization General Practices
No Rotating Text Orientation
When it comes to the orienta- tion of text, one study (Wigdor & Balakrishnan, 2005) found that the reading of rotated text 45 degrees in either direction was, on aver- age, 52% slower than reading normally oriented text (text rotated 90 degrees in either direction was 205% slower on average). It is best to avoid diagonal elements on the page.
appropriately size your visuals to their content.
Being Strategic about data markers and labels
COLORS
leverage color selectively as a strategic tool to highlight the important parts of your visual. I typically design my visuals in shades of grey + pick a single bold color to draw attention where I want it.
Red vs green: Sometimes, though, there is useful connotation that comes with using red and green: red to denote the double‐digit loss you want to draw attention to or green to highlight significant growth. You can still leverage this, but make sure to have some additional visual cue to set the important numbers apart so you aren’t inadvertently disenfranchising part of your audience.
Company Branding color in visualization: The key to success when that is the case is to identify one or maybe two brand‐appropriate colors to use as your “audience‐look‐here”
If you have some- thing really important, you can signal this and draw attention by making it large, colored, and bold.
Great Case Studies Exemplified:
Study these examples to see how above rules have been applied in reality:
