The Harvard Business Review Good Charts Collection

Appendix B

Chart Type guide

This guide, created by Andrew Abela, is a good starting point for thinking about chart types, but try not to use it as a decision engine. Not everyone will agree with his organization of the types, and the hierarchy doesn’t include every effective chart type. Indeed, each chart shown here has numerous variations and hybrids, and new ones are being created all the time. Plus this tool may narrow your thinking at a stage when you want to be expansive and experiment with multiple approaches. But it will help you understand categories of forms—comparison versus distribution, for example—and it may inspire you to try something. I’ve adapted it to work with the talk-sketch-prototype framework laid out here in chapter 6 ...