Check out these data visualization examples to get inspired
Aug 14, 2026
For six straight weeks in early 2026, the United States strategic petroleum reserve did not move. Week after week the Energy Information Administration published the same figure to within a rounding error, about 415.4 million barrels, while a war closed the most important oil passage on earth. Then in the week ending 27 March it fell, and it has fallen every week since.
Aug 11, 2026
Every charting tool assigns colours the same way: by position. The first category gets the first colour in the palette, the second gets the second, and so on down the list. Nothing about the data enters into it.
Aug 10, 2026
There is a piece of advice in data storytelling that nobody argues with. Do not show ten thousand deaths as a bar. Show ten thousand little human figures, so the reader remembers these are people. The technique has a name, anthropographics, and it has been recommended in conference talks, style guides and nonprofit design decks for a decade.
Aug 5, 2026
Open a spreadsheet, delete one cell in the middle of a column, and chart what is left. Something still gets drawn. The line breaks, or it stretches straight across the hole, or the bar disappears, or a zero appears where no measurement exists. Whatever happens, a decision was made about how to represent an absence, and you did not make it. Your tool did, silently, before you looked.
Aug 4, 2026
Everyone in data visualization knows the dinosaur. A dataset whose mean, standard deviation and correlation look utterly ordinary, and whose scatterplot is a picture of a Tyrannosaurus. It is a great demonstration and it has been told so many times that it has stopped doing any work.
Aug 3, 2026
Most advice about charts assumes a reader who can see the chart. Contrast, layout, colour, labelling: all of it is about making a visible thing easier to interpret. For a blind reader using a screen reader, none of that applies, because the chart is not difficult. It is missing. Where you see a line and a downturn and a recovery, they get a filename read aloud, or silence.
Aug 2, 2026
Responsive design arrived in data visualization as a layout problem. Squeeze the axes, rotate the labels, drop a legend, ship it. The chart got smaller, the content stayed the same, and the job was a media query.
Aug 1, 2026
There are two confident positions on animated charts and both are wrong. One says animation is decoration, a gimmick for people who cannot make a point with a static image. The other treats motion as self-evidently engaging and reaches for it by default. Neither camp seems to have read the research, which is unusual in being specific enough to settle the argument, and specific enough to embarrass both sides.
Jul 29, 2026
Here is a question with a number attached. You are in Midtown Manhattan and you need to be on the Upper East Side. How long does the taxi take? I have the answer, from 8,762 real trips between those two zones in January 2024. The average is 13.2 minutes. If I follow the convention of my field and put an error bar on that average, using the 95% confidence interval the way thousands of published charts do, here is what I am telling you.
Jul 28, 2026
Most advice about data storytelling is atmospheric. Find the narrative. Take the reader on a journey. Make it flow. None of it tells you what to actually build on Monday, which is why the same three failures keep shipping: the chart post that dumps a filterable table on a reader who wanted a sentence, the dashboard nobody can summarise, and the expensive interactive that everybody praised and nobody used.
Jul 27, 2026
Below is a scatterplot of New York City yellow taxi trips from January 2024, fare against distance. It is real data, straight from the city's own records. I cropped the axes to trips of 0 to 20 miles and 0 to 90 dollars, which holds 2,836,835 of the month's 2,964,624 records, or 95.7 percent of them, and keeps the file's nonsense out of the frame: one trip is logged at 312,722 miles, another at minus 899 dollars. Inside that window, nothing has been done to the data but draw a dot for each trip.
Jul 26, 2026
This is the most common way a real chart fails, and it has nothing to do with the famous sins of deception. Nobody truncated an axis or inverted a scale here. The data is honest. The chart is simply overloaded, and overload is its own kind of lie: it presents information while quietly making that information impossible to read.
