Big Data. That means there’s a lot of it. That means you can’t just dump it in a bar chart and hope for the best. You have to care for it, mould it into shape, and coax the good stuff from it. All that juicy insight. Mmmmm.

Last time, I told you how to make your data human. How to display it in a clear, frictionless way so your reader can pull the information they need from your chart. One of the things we looked at was how to show changes in the data to better tell a story.

Here, I’ll develop this way of thinking and explore the best type of chart to use to make comparisons.

In the beginning

Let’s start with a line chart. Here’s one showing the GDP before and after the 2008 crisis in a few countries:

It is a nice chart. It tells a story. But can we do better?

I’m not saying for a single second that one shouldn’t use line charts to show time series data. But let’s have a look at what other information we can pull out of this dataset when we start digging.