To me, the most important books on presenting data graphics are by Edward Tufte. People who create charts as part of their job should keep one or more of them close by, and regularly reread them.
The Visual Display of ...
A Tufte Library
Reading
Tables are often better than charts, especially with just a few data points. But sometimes a graph is what you need. Here’s an example from the Sunday New York Times magazine of August 6th 2006. It showed American opinions ...
Tables and Polls
Makeovers
A recent Guardian datablog article unveiled an infographic showing causes of death for 2011 in the UK. These are the official causes recorded on the coroner's report, so "old age" isn't generally considered detailed ...
How To Show How We Die
Makeovers
Choosing which projection to use is an important step in making a map, yet few people seen to spend much time on it. The Earth is a sphere and paper is flat, so any representation of the planet has to distort something. ...
Choosing a Map Projection
Tips
Here’s a graphic from the folks at Catalogtree, published March 4, 2007, in the New York Times Magazine, in an article on the influence Shia Islam is likely to have on Middle East elections. So where are all the ...
Disproportionate Risk
Makeovers
If you’re a biologist, having an nice representative outline of your study organism is very handy, especially if it can be scaled to any size without losing sharpness while remaining svelte enough to attach to an email. If ...
How to Silhouette
How To
Robin Williams (no, not the once-funny-now-supposedly-heartwarming-but-actually-mawkish actor) writes about design and type for non-professionals. Not many years ago, authors did the typing and someone else made the figures ...
The Robin Williams Library
Reading