dataviz

The ruled edge of a chart that maps position to value: scale, ticks, and labels that make the marks readable as numbers.

A drawing of data in which position, length, angle or colour carries the numbers, chosen so the comparison a reader needs is the easiest one to see.

A note pinned onto the data itself: a callout, arrow, or highlighted span that tells the reader what to see in the chart.

The key beside a chart that decodes series colours and symbols into names, and the first thing direct labeling tries to delete.

A year of days as a grid of week columns, each cell shaded by how much happened that day, so a habit reads as a pattern instead of a number.

Whiskers on a mark showing the range a value could plausibly take, so a chart does not imply precision it does not have.

Stacked bars where width is time spent and depth is call nesting, so the widest plateau rather than the tallest tower is the thing worth fixing.

A diagram of steps in boxes joined by arrows, read rather than operated, and now more often generated from a few lines of text than drawn by hand.

One row per task with a bar along a time axis, the bar showing when the work runs and lines between bars showing what waits for what.

A dial style readout showing one value on an arc between a minimum and a maximum, borrowed from instrument panels.

A gauge of a known quantity within a known range, such as disk used or password strength, where the level is a fact rather than a task.

A line drawn at a meaningful value across a chart: a target, a threshold, an average, a before-and-after moment.

A tiny chart with no axes or labels, drawn inline at text size to show the shape of a trend beside the number it belongs to.

A single number shown large with a label and often a change indicator, the unit a dashboard is built from.

How wide a chart is for its height, which sets the slopes of its lines; banking to 45 degrees keeps rates of change readable.

A grid of tiles, each holding one metric, chart or list, that a reader can often resize and rearrange.

The same small chart repeated in a grid, once per category, so comparison happens by eye movement instead of overplotting.

Tufte's word for ink that decorates a chart without carrying data: 3D bevels, gradient fills, mascots, gridline thickets.

Tufte's measure of chart economy: the share of ink that would be missed if erased, with everything else a candidate for deletion.

Writing series names next to the data instead of in a legend, trading a lookup for a glance.

Two value axes sharing one plot so two series can be compared, and a free knob for manufacturing whatever correlation you like.

Starting a value axis above zero so differences look bigger than they are; honest for lines and dots, a lie for bars.

Dragging a selection across one chart to highlight the same records in every linked view.

A data palette of distinct hues at roughly equal visual weight, used for groups that have no order so no colour reads as larger than another.

Giving each category its own colour so the eye can group and find by hue, which holds only while the set stays small and one colour means one thing everywhere.

A data palette built from two sequential scales meeting at a neutral midpoint, used when values run above and below a meaningful zero.

A data palette that runs light to dark in one direction, encoding an ordered quantity so that darker always means more.

The text alternative for a chart: a summary of the takeaway plus access to the underlying values, not a recital of the pixels.

Turning data into sound, mapping a series to pitch or rhythm, so a chart can be heard as a shape rather than described one value at a time.

The rule that colour must never be the only carrier of meaning, so a red field also needs an icon, wording, or shape change.