COMMON VISUALS AND

BEST PRACTICES

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Choose the
right chart

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RELATIONSHIP DISTRIBUTION

What do you
want to show?

COMPOSITION COMPARISON

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Fundamentals of chart and table
design
■ Maximize constrast between your data and the background
– Use a white-background and de-emphasized gridlines

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Fundamentals of chart and table
design
■ Reduce chart-junk and increase data-to-ink ratio
– Remove elements that are decorative or ornamental
– Make every pixel tell a story about your data

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Fundamentals of chart and table
design
■ Readable labels
– Whenever possible, avoid rotated labels; they are hard for people to read
and distract from focusing on the numbers

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Fundamentals of chart and table
design
■ Don’t repeat yourself, repitition is bad

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Fundamentals of chart and table
design
■ Avoid smoothing and 3D

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Fundamentals of chart and table
design
■ Careful uses of gradients

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Fundamentals of chart and table
design
■ Sort for comprehension
– Add structure and clarity to the chart by sorting by a metric of interest

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Fundamentals of chart and table
design
■ Use color variants
– Use variants on a hue or grey to show different data series when
displaying multicolumns or stacked charts

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Fundamentals of chart and table
design
■ Tables
– Remove gridlines
– Use lines or whitespace to separate areas that are conceptually different
– Display the smallest amount of numbers that you can to support the
needs of the table
– Use consistent column and row spacing to create horizontal and vertical
rhythm

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Fundamentals of chart and table
design
■ Tables
– Remove gridlines
– Use lines or whitespace to separate areas that are conceptually different
– Display the smallest amount of numbers that you can to support the
needs of the table
– Use consistent column and row spacing to create horizontal and vertical
rhythm

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Color brings meaning

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Color to display data

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Dashboard design principles - Color

■ Calling attention: Use highly saturated color for calling

attention, but be careful to not over-use
■ Consistency: Use the same color for the same items but in
different charts
■ Traffic light colors: Red, Yellow, and Green. Be consistent with
the meaning of these colors
■ Pre-define color palette: Use pre-built color theme in Power BI
for consistency

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Typography: A simple font framework

■ Body text is clean, readable content

■ Headers separate and name major sections of your
work
■ Notes describe additional things the reader should be
aware of. These should fade into the background unless
we call attention to them
■ Emphasis text is what we want our reader to pay
particular attention to

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