InfoGuides: Data Visualization: Refine Your Visualization

Refining a Visualization

Interactive Data Visualization Checklist (Stephanie Evergreen & Ann K Emery)
- Printable Version
- Note that some guidelines on labeling are not standard for academic papers.
Data Visualization Effectiveness Profile PDF (Stephen Few)
Video: Data Looks Better Naked (Dark Horse Analytics)

Practical Rules for Using Color in Charts PDF (Stephen Few, Perceptual Edge)
Being Clever with Color website + video (Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic)
Data Looks Better Naked (Dark Horse Analytics) Animated demonstrations that show simplifying chart colors and elements is best.
Telling the Truth (IDV Solutions) - Evaluating the different methods of coloring chloropleth maps, but useful for any categorization of numeric values

ColorBrewer - Assistance picking a color scheme (Cynthia Brewer, Penn State University)
Your Friendly Guide to Colors in Data Visualization - An exploration of color (Lisa Charlotte Muth)

Mistaken Data from Flowing Data (see also Ugly Charts which cannot be fixed)
Makeovers from Storytelling with Data - Includes Excel files with the revised graphs
Redesigns from PolicyViz - Includes Excel files with the revised graphs
Junk Charts from Kaiser Fung - A huge collection of examples with examples from the news
Chart Busters from Peltier Tech - Many examples with a discussion of various possibilities and reasons
Makeover Mondays - Collaboration between VizWiz and TriMyData
- Provides the Datasets ahead of time; uses Tableau

How to display data badly is a classic article by Howard Wainer in The American Statistician that shows many examples from the scientific literature.
The top ten worst graphs in the scientific literature according to Karl Broman

How to read charts - A compendium of difficult-to-read charts. UK Social and General Statistics Section of the House of Commons Library