FT Visual Vocabulary
Financial Times
The Financial Times’ one-page guide to choosing a chart, grouped by the relationship in the data you want to show.
What you will find
- Nine families: deviation, correlation, ranking, distribution, change over time, magnitude, part-to-whole, spatial and flow
- A handful of chart types in each family, with a note on when to use them
- The poster as a PDF, plus versions others have built for tools such as Tableau and Power BI
What we can learn from it
- 01Name the relationship first (ranking, change, part-to-whole), then pick the chart
- 02The same data can fit several families; the headline decides which one leads
Chart types you will meet there
Slope chart
Connects each item’s value at two points in time, so direction and size of change read at a glance.
Waterfall chart
Walks from a starting value to an ending value through each positive and negative contribution.
Lollipop chart
A line and a dot per category: the same length encoding as a bar with much less ink.
Bump chart
Tracks how the rank of each item changes over time; crossings are overtakes.
Similar sites
The Data Visualisation Catalogue
A reference library of chart types: one page per chart explaining what it shows, how to read it and which tools can make it.
Data Viz Project
A Copenhagen agency’s catalogue of chart types, browsable four ways: by family, by the data you have, by what you want it to do, and by the shape it makes.
From Data to Viz
A decision tree for choosing a chart: start from the format of your data and follow it to the chart types that fit, with their common pitfalls.