The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures

I do a lot of charting for financial services software. The best practical book that I've found is The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures. Simple but practical guidelines for displaying pie/line/area graphs. But for your situation, check out some of these sites which focus on more complicated graphing techniques: http://www.perceptualedge.com/examples.php http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2009/04/50-great-examples-... (http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2009/04/50-great-examples-of-infographics/) http://interface.fh-potsdam.de/infodesignpatterns/news.php http://patternbrowser.org/ http://webdesignledger.com/inspiration/15-stunning-examples-... (http://webdesignledger.com/inspiration/15-stunning-examples-of-data-visualization) http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/

Tufte is great, but he's extremely heavy and a bit dated. He is about 80% brilliant 20% completely missing the point. It's very strange. If you are looking for a smaller book I've found the WSJ Guide to Information Graphics by Dona Wong to be pretty decent and pretty straight forward, and it's about 100 pages. It's not too focused on finance either, although that's what I got it for (I do front end development for financial analysis company - lots of charting). http://www.amazon.com/Street-Journal-Guide-Information-Graph... (http://www.amazon.com/Street-Journal-Guide-Information-Graphics/dp/0393072959)