Visualization Universe – Catalogue Of The Most Popular Charts And Graphs

We recently created catalogue of the most popular graphs and charts based on the most popular google searches. It’s an interactive infographic:

View The Graphic

The catalogue contains the most popular (according to Google Trends) charts, tools and books in data visualization field.

The Science of Visualization

The science of data visualization speaks to visual thinkers. So a visual catalog of all types of visualization must exist, we thought.
But what is visualization? What does this field include?

There are two distinct ways that visualization exists: data visualization (which is only for numeric data) and information design or infographic design which is usually for visualization of numeric data with a narrative or just narrative data.

The types of visualizations show both of these fields, trying to answer the question.

How can any information be visualized?

Data visualization is a relatively new as a field. Few people who work in it today studied it in college.

Even today, most people are familiar with the charts at the top of the popularity list: the bar chart, pie chart, histogram, line chart. As the Google Trends data shows, most people are not searching for chord chard or the alluvial diagram. To many it might seem as though what used to be a relatively simple choice of charts has mushroomed into a smorgasbord of charts and diagrams with exotic shapes.

But most of the charts are not new, in fact many of them are over 100 years old. The reason they are becoming more popular now is two-fold: more data has become available and with that more complex relationships between this data need to be shown.

For example, take the windrose chart that goes back to the Medieval ages when emerged as a compass rose which shows the frequency of winds blowing from particular directions over a specified period. This chart started originally as a shape without the numeric dimension.