A rule of thumb is you should annotate your chart items right there next to them whenever possible. This gives your viewers an easy way to evaluate and understand the data presented. This is all great but what if you have a very limited space to work in? You may either be on a smartphone […]
When building an infographic you know exactly what your data looks like and can make an editorial decision on the best way to present it. For web applications, on the other hand, the shape and form of live data coming from some data source are not always known upfront. So, whatever you imagine about the […]
Multiple chart types in one visual are nothing new in the infographics space. In your “regular” functional web charting world this almost never happens. Obviously, not all datasets are best expressed with a multi-type chart mix though some are. The primary reason why you never see such “hybrids” in the wild is that it’s often […]
Radar and Polar charts help you represent series of quantitative variables in a circular manner on axes starting from the same point. You can think of Radar chart as a radial version of a line chart, and Polar chart as a radial bar chart. Both chart types are at their best when variables in a […]
Treemaps are a great data visualization tool to represent data items as part of a whole. Items in a treemap are represented as rectangles proportionally to their value and fill up the entire chart area. This lets viewers perceive their relative size much better than with slices in a pie chart and it also lends […]
In this and several of the following tips, we will cover some of the more “exotic” chart types you can use to visualize your data. Today we are starting with a Sankey Diagram. Sankey diagrams are used to depict the flow of data between several categories. This chart type is very good at giving viewers […]
Your data visualizations are based on data (duh!). This data comes from somewhere. When it’s not your data, remember to credit the source. And even when it’s yours a good explanation of where this data comes from and how it was collected goes a long way towards setting the playing field and expectations for the […]
Every month we give away a dataviz book to one of our newsletter subscribers. Last month it was the classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte. And the book is on its way to India to Abdul Haseeb from Trading System API. We are continuing the tradition of following a practical […]
In the purest data visualization world, things that detract from the comprehension of the data are often frowned upon. Things like 3D charts, visual effects, and other purely aesthetic enhancements are often considered a no-no. This point of view is perfectly valid and even valuable in a world where you create scientific reports or visualizations […]
In static data visualizations, you have to always look for a compromise between showing the whole picture and not overwhelming the viewer by overloading the chart with too many details. Luckily, with interactivity on the web, you can surface the most important information while still letting the viewer explore the details. Like in this stock […]