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Data Viz Design Guide
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A Step-by-Step
Design Guide
for Data Visualizations 🎉 📈
Use these simple checklists to turn terrible visualizations into
stunningly adequate
ones.
axes
Using full-width grid or tick lines
Backgrounding grid or tick lines
Thick baselines
Selecting a lower bound
Selecting an upper bound
Placing your annotations
bars
Removing borders on bars
Ordering bars
Don't use diagonal labels
Thinning out columns
Extra-wide, 100% columns
color
Make unimportant things grey
Choosing colors
interactivity
Planning for lazy users
Tell a story
Tooltip directions
Layering lines
Dense circles
Close enough should be good enough
legends
Rounding off numbers
Marking boundaries instead of ranges
Horizontal vs vertical orientation
Removing inside boundaries
Removing maximum/minimum values
Outlining color blocks
lines
Using a line graph
Smoothing out jagged lines
Plotting dots on your lines
Backgrounding data dots on lines
text
Citing sources
Directly labeling your data points
Giving your visualization a title
Standardizing your font sizes
Taking credit
Too many labels