The Economist: Graphic Detail
The Economist
The Economist’s section for charts, maps and data journalism, drawn in one of the most recognisable house styles in print and online.
What you will find
- Regular data stories built around a chart or a map
- A strict house style: a clear title, a subtitle that states the unit, and sources at the foot
- Code and data for some projects on the paper’s GitHub
- A published review of its own chart mistakes, with redraws
What we can learn from it
- 01A house style is a reading aid: readers learn where to look once
- 02Charts designed to be read at small sizes, with direct labels instead of legends
- 03Owning mistakes publicly, with a better version, builds trust in the rest
Chart types you will meet there
Line chart
Shows how a measure changes across an ordered, continuous axis, usually time.
Bar chart
Horizontal bars compare a measure across categories, with room for long category names.
Scatter plot
Plots two numeric measures against each other to reveal correlation, clusters and outliers.
Choropleth map
Colours each region by a rate or share, showing geographic patterns.
Similar sites
Reuters Graphics
The Reuters graphics desk: visual and interactive stories on the news, from elections and conflicts to disasters and climate.
The Pudding
A digital publication of visual essays that explain ideas debated in culture, from music and film to language and the internet.
FlowingData
Nathan Yau’s site on visualization and statistics: his own charts, a roundup of good work elsewhere, and tutorials on how to make them.