I recently published an article in the Data Visualization Society’s excellent Nightingale journal that attempts to answer these questions, a summary of which is copied below:

In the data visualization community, there are those who believe that there are universal rules such as “Never use pie charts”, or, “Always include zero in a chart’s scale”, and then there are those who believe that there are no universal rules that apply in all situations, only general principles that must be adapted to the specific situation at hand based on judgment and experience. I propose a third possibility, which is that many common dataviz design decisions can be codified as formal rules that apply in all situations, it’s just that those rules tend to be too complex to be expressed as single sentences. They can, however, be expressed as relatively simple decision trees that can reliably guide practitioners of any experience level to the best design choice.

Want to read the rest? Check out the full article on the Nightingale site.

By the way...

If you’re interested in attending my Practical Charts or Practical Dashboards course, here’s a list of my upcoming open-registration workshops.