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Best chart types

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Allison Horst

Observable

Robert Kosara

A practical guide to alternatives to standard chart types using Observable Plot to build advanced visualizations that can help uncover trends, changes, flow, distribution, and relationships. 

Beyond bar charts: A guide to advanced visualizations

By thinking more like data journalists, data teams can make their visualizations and dashboards clearer, more targeted, and more useful. In this guide, we unpack practical strategies from data journalism that analysts can adapt for their own day-to-day workflows. 

What data teams can learn from journalists about data visualization

There are many factors that go into data visualization decisions, but one of the most important is selecting the right chart. This post outlines which charts work best for different types of data.  

Choosing the right chart for your data

Grid cartograms are thematic maps that represent spatial regions with simplified geometric shapes like squares or hexagons. In this overview, we introduce grid cartograms, highlight pros and cons of this chart type, describe common alternatives, and share resources that can help you start building them with Observable.

What is a grid cartogram?

The Observable team and community have created thousands of openly shared data visualizations in Observable Plot and D3. To easily reuse them, your data needs to be in the expected shape. Learn about the data shapes that many Plot and D3 charts consume, and how to transform your data so you can drop it into existing examples.

Reshaping data for visualizations with D3 and Observable Plot

An exploration of using Claude to help write basic D3 code for time series data

How effective are AI tools for writing D3 code?

We took a look at where treemaps originated, and how this common data visualization is used on BI dashboards today

A brief history of treemaps

Few chart types are irredeemably bad, but the radar chart definitely is. In this post, we share why radar charts are ultimately a poor representation of data.

Why you should avoid radar charts in data visualization

Learn about eight useful (and underused!) chart options in Observable Plot that will help you to quickly update the look, feel, and behavior of your data visualizations, without reinventing the wheel.

Eight underused options to customize charts in Observable Plot

A closer look at bar charts, why they work better for categorical data than line charts, and why things are a bit more complicated when it comes to time

Data visualization insights