Break your bar chart habit

Deconstructing visualization design using the Grammar of Graphics

Original art by the author

Remember that truly stellar bar chart you saw a few months ago? Truthfully, no one else does either, and that’s a problem for those of us in the business of communicating data with impact.

We often describe chart design as a dichotomous process of selecting specific charts for specific purposes: Lines describe change over time, bars compare quantities, histograms or box plots illustrate distributions, and so on. Groupings like these that cluster charts according to characteristics or usage are broadly referred to as visualization taxonomies.

Visualization taxonomies play an important role in data visualization theory and design. These taxonomies — like in any other domain — are powerful organizational tools. They can be a useful starting place when you begin conceptualizing a chart and are essential for creating rules-based chart generation tools. However, while they excel in predictability, they do little to inspire the kind of out-of-the-box thinking needed to create custom visualizations that wow and entertain your reader.

Fortunately, there’s another systematic way to approach chart design that provides more flexibility than a taxonomy while ensuring that the resulting figure is interpretable. In the academic…