Choosing the right type of chart is an essential part of producing an effective data visualization. It’s pointless adding bells and whistles to something that’s fundamentally unsuited to the
message you are trying to convey.
The Financial Times Visual Journalism team have a Visual Vocabulary tool that helps them choose the correct chart for a story. It’s basically a catalog of charts indexed by the following data relationships
- Deviation
- Correlation
- Change over time
- Ranking
- Distribution
- Part to whole
- Magnitude
- Spatial
- Flow
There’s also a PDF poster available.
