Check out these data visualization examples to get inspired
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.
Jul 25, 2026
Most people who share a news story never open it. When researchers matched 2.8 million shared links against the clicks they actually generated, 59 percent of the links were never clicked at all. A separate study of 35 million Facebook posts found that about three quarters of news-link shares were made without the sharer opening the article first. The headline did the work. The article was scenery.
Jul 23, 2026
On 21 July the United States announced a 50 percent tariff on Canada, and the coverage split into two familiar camps almost instantly: this is a bold stand against an unfair trading partner, or this is a reckless tax on American consumers. Both camps mostly skipped the part that actually tells you what the tariff is for. Read the exemptions.
Jul 18, 2026
In early 2013 a third-year economics PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was given a routine assignment: take a famous empirical paper and try to reproduce it. Thomas Herndon, then 28, picked the most influential macroeconomics paper of the decade. He could not make the numbers come out. He emailed the authors, and to their considerable credit they sent him their original working spreadsheet.
Jul 14, 2026
Pull up almost any ranking of the world's richest countries and Ireland is sitting at or near the top, a small island out-earning Switzerland, Norway, and the United States per head. It is the kind of stat that goes viral: little Ireland, richest in Europe. There is only one problem.
Jul 13, 2026
On the first Friday of most months, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, a single number moves trillions of dollars. Traders position for it, the Federal Reserve leans on it, campaigns cut ads around it, and the wire services race to publish it within seconds. The number is the monthly change in nonfarm payrolls.
Jul 11, 2026
In 1954 a journalist named Darrell Huff published a slim book that taught a generation how to lie with a graph. How to Lie with Statistics gave the tricks names. The Gee-Whiz Graph chops off its own baseline so a rounding error looks like a boom. The One-Dimensional Picture draws a doubled number as a blob with four times the area. Seventy years later the tricks have not changed. What changed, in January 2026, is that a machine learned to draw them by the thousand.
Jul 7, 2026
The 2016 election polls were, by the official autopsy, among the most accurate in modern history. The win-probability chart drawn on top of them was the disaster. Here is how a single number broke America's trust, and what a decade of research says will fix it before the 2026 midterms.
Jul 6, 2026
Ask an AI to make a chart and it will. Ask whether that chart is honest and it will say yes, whether or not it is. The machines drawing the world's charts have a specific, dangerous blind spot.
Jul 5, 2026
Every dashboard has a bar labeled "average." It feels like the safest number in the room. It usually describes no one at all, and the proof comes from a runway.
