01 / 11
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
Units sold
02 / 11
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
USD · 2025
03 / 11
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
Jan – Dec
04 / 11
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
Stacked
05 / 11
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
Chrome 50%
Safari 30%
Other 20%
06 / 11
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
n = 24
07 / 11
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)
bins = 12
08 / 11
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
09 / 11
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
10 / 11
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
11 / 11
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