Andy Kirk

Andy Kirk’s approach is a design process rather than fixed rules: each decision follows from the brief. Book: Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data Driven Design (2016; third edition 2024).

Use it when the brief is new or unclear: a new or mixed audience, unfamiliar data, or a page whose purpose must be decided before its charts. For other pages, see Choose an expert.

Illustrative example with synthetic data. An explicit brief connects data, chart choice and reader action.

Work through the decisions in order

Record each answer before moving on.

Decide	In an App
Brief: who reads the page, what they need to do, how often, on which screens	Choose the layout and style from this
Data: what the fields mean, their gaps, zeros and grain	Keep gaps visible; group dates with setDimensionTemporalGrouping (Charts)
Editorial: what to show, for which items and period, with what emphasis	Filters, Top N, sorting and colour
Representation: which type shows the relationship	Chart choices
Interactivity: what readers can change or reveal	Tooltips, filters, drill-through
Annotation: titles, labels, captions	Axis titles, data labels, text beside the chart
Colour: what colour encodes, in both themes	Colour visualizations with operations
Composition: placement, size and order	The layout page and Layout and responsiveness

Balance trustworthy, accessible and elegant

Resolve conflicts in this order.

• Trustworthy. Bars start at zero (check the rendered axis; where it does not, use a dot chart, which encodes position, not length); stack only measures with the same unit; format values with their unit; group items that Top N hides; keep real zeros visible.
• Accessible. Measure contrast in both themes (Measure contrast), do not rely on colour alone, label directly, and caption unfamiliar types.
• Elegant. Use the same type, colours and labels for the same question across pages, and remove chrome that does not help the reader.

Chart choices

A standard type is the default. Choose a less familiar one when it shows the relationship more directly and the audience can learn to read it. Check its operations page before promising a styling choice; each type publishes its own operations.

Relationship	Standard	Alternative
Comparing categories	bar	dot; heatMap for two dimensions; radar for a profile
Change over time	line	combo for two related measures; heatMap for hour by weekday
Part of a whole	Stacked bar	pie for few parts; waterfall for contributions to a total
Hierarchy	table	treemap, tree
Flow between stages	bar per stage	sankey
Two measures against each other	scatter	scatter with a size measure
Distribution	histogram	—
Single value	number	gauge against a target
Frequency of terms	table or bar	word-cloud when the gist matters more than exact values

The brief decides the layout and style; Compose a dashboard page maps briefs to both.

Not available

Chord diagrams, maps and annotations on a single data point are not available; see App limitations. Use fixed axis ranges to keep comparisons on the same scale.