Track 01 · Foundations
Foundations knowledge check
Five quick questions. Prove the basics stuck before you move on.
- A stakeholder asks “are we growing?”. What does a good chart give them?
- Every data point, precisely
- A fast, confident answer to that one question
- The most impressive-looking visual
- As many KPIs as possible
- Which visual encoding do people read most accurately?
- Colour hue
- Area (size of a circle)
- Position along a common axis
- Angle (pie slices)
- When is a plain table the right choice?
- When showing a trend over time
- When people need to look up exact values
- When comparing many categories
- Never — always use a chart
- What makes a dashboard feel “cluttered”?
- Using whitespace
- Sorting bars by value
- Showing everything with equal emphasis
- Having one clear headline
- The fastest way to make a chart honest:
- Add a 3D effect
- Start the value axis at zero
- Use more colours
- Hide the axis labels