Ranking
Bar Chart
Horizontal bars excel at ranking. Long category names read naturally left-to-right, and dozens of items stack tidily down the page without sacrificing label clarity.
Top product categories
Comparison
Comparison
Column Chart
The workhorse of comparison. Vertical columns let the eye judge length along a common baseline — one of the most accurate visual encodings for categorical data with short labels.
Revenue by region
Trend
Line Chart
The clearest way to show change over a continuous variable — usually time. Slope tells you direction, steepness tells you rate, crossings tell you where one series overtakes another.
Monthly active users
Comparison
Radar Chart
Plots several quantitative variables on spokes radiating from a shared center. Best for comparing the overall "shape" of a few items across the same set of metrics.
Skill profile
Relationship
Relationship
Scatter Plot
Each point is one observation across two variables. Reveals correlation, clusters, and outliers — the chart that lets the data's structure show itself, rather than imposing one.
Hours vs. score
Relationship
Bubble Chart
A scatter plot with a third variable encoded as dot size. Reveals relationships across three dimensions at once — x position, y position, and magnitude.
Revenue · users · margin
Relationship
Connected Scatter
A scatter plot whose points are joined in time order. Shows how the relationship between two variables evolves — tracing a path rather than a static cloud.
Inflation vs. rates
Density
Heatmap
A grid where color intensity encodes a third value across two dimensions. Excellent for spotting density and pattern at a glance — calendar usage, correlation matrices, geographic clusters.
Active users · day × hour
Distribution
Distribution
Histogram
A bar chart for a single continuous variable, binned into ranges. Reveals the shape of a distribution — where the mass is, whether it's skewed, whether you're looking at one population or several.
Response time (ms)
Statistical
Box Plot
A compact summary of a distribution: median, quartiles, range, and outliers — all in one mark. Indispensable when comparing the spread of many groups side-by-side.
Response time by region
Distribution
Violin Plot
A box plot crossed with a density curve — the width at each value shows where data clusters. Reveals multi-modal shapes a plain box plot would hide.
Score distribution
Distribution
Strip Plot
Every observation plotted along one axis, jittered to avoid overlap. Honest about sample size and outliers — you see the real data points, not a summary of them.
Response time by tier
Composition
Proportion
Pie & Donut
Parts of a whole, expressed as angle. Reliable only for two or three slices — beyond that, eyes can't distinguish small angular differences and a bar chart will read clearer.
Browser share
Chrome50%
Safari30%
Other20%
Volume
Area Chart
A line chart with the area below filled in. Adds visual weight that emphasizes volume or cumulative magnitude — useful for showing how a total accumulates or how parts stack up.
Hours logged
Hierarchy
Treemap
Hierarchical proportions packed into a rectangle. Each block's area represents its value, and nesting shows containment — efficient for showing both share and structure in a single dense view.
Budget allocation
Flow
Sankey Diagram
Shows flow between states. Thickness of each ribbon represents quantity transferred — the best chart for tracing how a user, a dollar, or an electron moves through a system.
Signup → activation flow
✦
Data Viz in the Age of AI
Charts are increasingly generated from a sentence — and the model can pick the encoding and narrate the insight for you.
✦ AI Era
Describe, Don’t Configure
Natural-language charting: "show revenue by region as bars" produces the chart. The prompt replaces the chart-type picker and the axis menus.
✦ AI Era
AI Picks the Encoding
Given raw data, a model can suggest the right chart type and narrate the takeaway in plain language above it — a first draft a human still edits.