Data Viz - konradmayer/knowledge-base GitHub Wiki

Data to ink ratio - less is more

Awesome animations from: https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-naked

bar chart gets decluttered by removing backgroung, redundant labels, borders, useless colors and clever highlighting and labelling is used to create a much better plot.

Pie chart gets decluttered by removing 3D effects, background, borders, redundancy and finally ends up being converted to a bar chart

A table gets decluttered by removing colors, grid, fills, borders and bolding, text is left aligned, numbers right aligned and formatting improved by spacing, rounding of numbers and highlighting

However, while "less is more" is generally a good advice, some wisely used visual enhancements can also have advantages over minimalist approaches: e.g. see this paper (http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753716)

Great ressources

https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/

Tools

Open source or free:

R (base graphics, lattice and ggplot)
https://www.datawrapper.de/ (they also offer a free plan)
https://inkscape.org/ (open source equivalent to Adobe Illustrator)
https://draw.io/

Proprietary:

https://biorender.com/ (offer also a free plan - but you aren't allowed to publish in journals with it)
https://chemix.org/ (offer also a free plan - but you aren't allowed to publish in journals with it)
https://www.tableau.com/community/academic (free for students and teaching)