All sorts of visualization techniques exist to surface your data. Companies like Ferdio have even created data visualization catalogs that illustrate every type of chart or graph you could choose from. As a data visualization company, it's important to educate users on how to best reach their goals with their visualizations. We've already provided our ultimate guide to visualizing data, but this article will be a more succinct visual demonstration of how to choose the best stylization of your data.
Chart or Graph? That is the question.
The graph guide breaks up your options into 4 paths:
1. Comparison
2. Relationship
3. Distribution
4. Composition
While TapClicks offers many visuals, a data visualization expert is still needed to generate certain types of graphs or charts, such as the 3d area chart. The New York Times offers an astounding example of an expertly made 3d area chart if you're as interested in the data visualization world as we are.
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A comparison can detail over time ranging from many periods to a few periods, or you can group it into among items and give it two variables per item, one variable per item, and you can go further by providing a range of categories (these are typically seen in column charts or bar charts).
A relationship chart is fairly simple. You can visualize in scatter and bubble charts and you can variegate it by the number of variables. We've only decided to list two or three variables as these are the most common.
A composition can be grouped by change over time or by static groupings. If you choose the non-static route you can choose to visualize over a few periods or many periods with relative and absolute differences. Sometimes you may only want the relative differences to matter, while others you may want both.
In static, you have a TapClicks user favorite, the pie chart, which covers a simple share of the total, while waterfall and stacked column charts demonstrate an accumulation or subtraction from total and components of components.
The last visualization guide method delves into distribution. You can choose between three variables, two, or just one variable, and you can choose a few data points or many, such as the line histogram.
If you're looking for a detailed breakdown of each of these chart types by things like family, function, input, or shape, we really do recommend you take a look at the data viz project. Birger Morgenstjerne and his team have done a great job teaching people about data visualization.
I hope this graphic can be of use to you all in your data visualization efforts. Go forth and visualize!
