Some best practices for visualization
The first important step one can take to make a great visualization is to know what is the goal behind the effort. How does one know if the visualization has a purpose? It is also very important to know who the audience is and how this will help them.
Once the answers to these questions are known, and the purpose of visualization is well understood, the next challenge is to choose the right method to present it. The most commonly-used types of visualization could further be categorized according to the following:
Comparison and ranking
Correlation
Distribution
Location-specific or geodata
Part-to-whole relationships
Trends over time
Comparison and ranking
Comparing and ranking can be done in more than one way, but the traditional way is by using bar charts. A bar chart is believed to encode quantitative values as length on the same baseline. However, it is not always the best way to display comparison and rankings. For instance, to display the top 12 countries...
