CI-001
The bar chart.
The bar chart is where most analytical work begins — and, too often, where it ends.
← Chart Design Field Guide
Chart Index
A practical reference to chart types, their strengths, limitations and design principles.
CI-005
The pie and donut chart.
The pie chart is the form everyone has used and almost no expert recommends.
CI-007
The table and the heatmap.
The table is the form analysts dismiss as just data, and the form readers reach for first when they want a specific number.
CI-009
The grouped bar chart.
A grouped bar chart is the bar chart's answer to two categorical variables.
CI-010
The stacked bar chart.
The stacked bar takes the same data as a grouped bar and rearranges the question.
CI-014
The dot plot.
The dot plot is Cleveland's refinement of the bar chart, and the form he argued was perceptually superior for nearly every ranking task.
CI-015
The box plot.
The box plot is Tukey's invention, and one of the most efficient chart types ever designed.
CI-016
The violin plot.
The violin plot answers the box plot's biggest weakness: a box hides the shape of the distribution.
CI-017
The strip and jitter plot.
The strip plot is the most honest chart for showing a distribution: every observation is a dot.
CI-018
The ridge (joy) plot.
The ridge plot — also known as the joy plot, after Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album cover — stacks density curves vertically.
CI-021
The treemap.
The treemap is Ben Shneiderman's 1991 answer to a hard problem: how do you show a hierarchical part-to-whole with hundreds of items?
CI-024
The Marimekko (mosaic) chart.
The Marimekko chart — named after the Finnish textile designer Marimekko, in homage to its grid-like geometry — is a stacked bar with a twist: every bar's width is also data.
CI-025
The waterfall chart.
The waterfall chart shows how a starting value becomes an ending value through a series of additions and subtractions.
CI-026
The trend ribbon.
The trend ribbon is Datashow's own design — a stylised hybrid of the sparkline, the bullet chart, and the range plot.
CI-027
The bump chart.
The bump chart is a slope chart with more than two time points and a ranked y-axis.
CI-028
The candlestick chart.
The candlestick chart is the financial markets' native time-series form.
CI-029
The horizon chart.
The horizon chart is what you get when you take a line / area chart, fold it into bands by magnitude, and stack the bands.
CI-030
The calendar heatmap.
The calendar heatmap is the most familiar specialised chart in modern dashboards, thanks to GitHub's contribution graph.
CI-031
The bubble chart.
The bubble chart is a scatter plot with a third dimension: each point becomes a circle whose area encodes an additional quantitative variable.
CI-032
Parallel coordinates.
Parallel coordinates is the form that lets you visualise many continuous variables at once.
CI-033
The chord diagram.
The chord diagram visualises relationships between categorical entities as arcs around a circle, connected by ribbons whose thickness encodes the strength of each relationship.
CI-034
The network (force-directed) graph.
A force-directed network graph is the visualisation of a graph — nodes connected by edges — laid out by a physics simulation.
CI-035
The Sankey diagram.
The Sankey diagram visualises flows between nodes as ribbons whose widths are proportional to the quantities flowing through them.
CI-036
The choropleth.
A choropleth map encodes a quantitative variable as the colour of geographic regions.
CI-037
The hexbin and H3 map.
A hexbin map replaces the irregular polygons of a choropleth with a uniform grid of hexagons.
CI-038
The value-by-alpha map.
A value-by-alpha map is a choropleth that fades regions based on a second variable — typically population or sample size.
CI-039
The radar (spider) chart.
The radar chart — also called a spider, web, or polar profile — arranges multiple variables on radial axes emanating from a centre, then connects the values along the axes into a polygon.
CI-042
The streamgraph and stacked area.
The stacked area chart is a line chart's contribution to part-to-whole over time.
CI-043
The Voronoi diagram.
A Voronoi diagram partitions a plane into regions based on distance to a set of seed points.
CI-047
The geographic base map.
A geographic base map provides spatial context without assigning a quantitative value to every region.
CI-053
The cartogram.
A cartogram redraws a map so that geographic area represents a quantitative value rather than land.