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Many people were dismayed by a spiral chart that served as a header image for a New York Times Opinion piece. I thought it was fine. Others had other opinions. Disregarding whether or not it was the “best” way to visualize the data, clearly the more important question is how to make such a chart. Here’s how to make it in R. Read More
When you have many categories, use ridgelines to create an extremely compact visualization where you can easily identify major patterns and outliers. They are especially useful to display surges in mostly flat data series. Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
Stacked area charts are a standard chart type that shows how a categorical distribution changes over time. There are packages that can do most of the work for you, but for a recent chart I found myself wanting more control over how the chart was drawn, which led me to drawing from scratch. Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
ggplot2 provides sensible default settings for analysis, but when you make charts for a publication, you often need to match an existing style and shift focus to readability over exploration. Design around a message or results instead of leaving interpretation open-ended. Finally, you need to export your charts in the required file format with the correct dimensions and resolution. Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses,...
Circle packing in visualization is a way to arrange circles in a fixed space so that none of the circles overlap, and if you were to increase the radius of any circle, it’d overlap with a neighbor. This can be a useful method to have in your toolbox to make various types of charts or to make existing charts more readable. Become a member for access to this — plus...
An alluvial diagram is a type of flow chart that is useful to show change over time. You see how individual categories and how the composition of the categories shift. Incorporate ranking into the mix at each time segment, and you get a good idea of how order changes over time too. The geometry is like a combination of a stacked bar chart and a bump chart. I made a...
When you want to compare between three parts of your data, ternary plots might be a good option. Here is how to make them. Read More
Also known as trellis charts, lattice chart, or whatever you want to call them, the technique lets you compare several categories in one view. Read More
Beeswarm charts are useful to highlight individual categories or entities. Animating them can help highlight change over time. Read More