Spotlight I: A Good Chart is Easy to Read and Honest

If you want to delve into this topic then Alberto Cairo’s books are the next step to take for good content on charts. His latest, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (Norton, 2019), is clear and readable with plenty of helpful illustrations.

His earlier title the truthful art: data, charts, and maps for communication (New Riders 2016) is a good source of meaty content and helpful references if you want to go more deeply into information graphics and visualisation.

Stephen Few has also written about how to avoid sharing misinformation through poorly designed charts. See his book: Show Me The Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten (Analytics Press, 2012).

Other sources I read while working on this book are Jean-luc Doumont’s Trees, maps and theorems (principiae, 2009) and Edward Tufte: books by Edward Tufte

Chapter 4 of Gordon Rugg’s Using Statistics: A Gentle Introduction (Open University Press 2007) is a good introduction  what you might see in a graph: ‘Patterns in data and presentation of data’. Most statistics books I’ve read don’t have anything about charts.