Gotta Grid’em All!

How to improve chart clarity by considering your plot background

When building charts data visualizers often focus on colors, shapes, and element aesthetics. We rarely think much about the background, especially the gridlines where all our data lives.

Slightly changing the plot background can bring more context and improve the comprehensibility of your graphics.

A tiny change can add context

To illustrate this point, I visualized a Pokemon dataset containing information about each creature, including attack and defense statistics.

Attack-over-defense statistics featured on a classic horizontal/vertical background grid.

This classic grid doesn’t provide much information. You can differentiate data points from each other, but that’s all it offers.

Now consider the same plot with added gridlines arranged to highlight the sum of attack and defense statistics.

Same chart, different gridlines.

It was already quite easy to see that Pokemon on the top right are the strongest. Adding these…