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Data visualization: all the resources you'll ever need!

You want to start creating clear and attractive data visuals, but don’t know where to start? No worries, here’s a complete overview of tools, resources and inspiration you can use as a starting point for your designs.

Presentation

Doctoral Schools – Turning research data into powerful visuals:

Finding useful datasets

Inspiration for data visualization

Digital tools to create infographics and data visuals

Illustrations and icons

Colour schemes

Typography

Creating graphs

Creating maps

Creating tables

Ethics in data visualization

  • Dealing with outliers: https://flowingdata.com/2018/03/07/visualizing-outliers/
  • Visualizing projections and missing data: https://flowingdata.com/2018/01/30/visualizing-incomplete-and-missing-data/
  • Spurious correlations: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
  • About dynamite plots: http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/Main/DynamitePlots
  • Alternatives to box plots: https://nightingaledvs.com/ive-stopped-using-box-plots-should-you/
  • Visualizing the uncertainty in data (Flowing Data): https://flowingdata.com/2018/01/08/visualizing-the-uncertainty-in-data/
  • Visualizing uncertainty (Claus Wilke): https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/visualizing-uncertainty.html

Books about infographics and data visualization

  • Data visualisation, Andy Kirk
  • Dear Data, Giorgia Lupi & Stefanie Posavec
  • Information graphics, Taschen
  • Infographic designers’ sketchbooks, Steven Heller & Rick Landers
  • Storytelling with data, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
  • The visual display of quantitative information, Edward Tufte
  • Trees, maps and theorems, Jean-Luc Doumont
  • Visual journalism, Gestalten
  • Visual thinking, Willemien Brand

People on Twitter talking about data

Videos about data visualization

Dataviz blogs and online magazines

Dataviz podcasts

Books on a bookshelf - infographics resources

Read more:

Side-by-side comparison of two bar chart versions showing the number of inhabitants per paid political mandate across EU27 countries, ranked from lowest to highest. The left version labels countries with two-letter abbreviations (FR, CZ, SI, etc.), while the right version uses full country names (France, Czechia, Slovenia, etc.). Both show identical data: France has the lowest ratio at 134 inhabitants per mandate, rising through the EU27 average of 385 (highlighted in dark blue), up to Latvia with the highest ratio at 2,570. Source: European Committee of the Regions and VRT NWS.

Avoiding abbreviations

People are lazy. Make it as easy as possible for them to see what you are trying to show. There are tons of ways to reduce mental noise in your charts, but one of the easiest is avoiding abbreviations.

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6 September 2026

Three-panel spread: the Nature magazine cover for 23 July 2026, featuring a detailed pencil-and-ink illustration of a rhinoceros beetle alongside drafting tools; a magazine page for the article 'Three Tips to Avoid AI Image Mistakes in Science' with an abstract red-and-blue line illustration of a hand and pencil; and a painted illustration of a hornbill's head with two circular inset diagrams showing colorful cross-sections of its skull anatomy.

The uncomfortable relationship between scientific illustrations and AI

Scientific journal Nature devoted the headline of its 23 July 2026 issue to “the human art of scientific illustration in the age of artificial intelligence”. Of course, that sparked my attention.

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27 August 2026

Review: Info We Trust

Info We Trust is an ambitious, visually stunning book that sits somewhere between philosophy, information design, and a collection of visual essays.

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28 January 2026

Gridlines are better than axes

Almost always, gridlines are better than axes. Vertical axes are the default option, and they have been around for centuries, so they are very well known. But they also have downsides. My biggest problem with vertical axes is that they’re often so far away from where the action is really happening.

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24 September 2025

Review: A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication

Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer clearly love graphs. But A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication isn’t just about graphs — it’s about the stories behind them: the context, the people, the new measurements that made them necessary, and the discoveries they enabled.

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18 September 2025

Report visuals don’t have to suck

Discover how CREG, Belgium’s electricity regulator, turns complex data into clear and engaging visuals. From smart annotations to small multiples and uncommon chart types, their Monitoring Report shows how thoughtful data visualization makes technical reports easier to read and understand.

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1 September 2025

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