A Compendium of Canonical Charts · Chris Parmer

In many fields there is a single canonical way to visualize a certain type<br>of data.

Charts that are full of nice little design details - in their annotations,<br>colors, highlights, layout, transformations, axes - that you may not see in<br>any other field. Useful details for their very particular problem at hand<br>and conventions that render them familiar and easy to interpret for everyone<br>in the field, once learned.

It's not a heatmap, it's a Callan quilt. It's not a contour plot,<br>it's a wafer chart. And so on.

I call these canonical charts.<br>These aren't your run of the mill graphs and they aren't your performative visualizations, these are charts that do the job. And I'm fascinated by them. They have history<br>and gravitas. It's how that data has always been visualized and it's how<br>that data it will always be visualized.

This is a compendium of such. 70 of my favorites here and another 70<br>honorable mentions over there.<br>I've tried to use real, recent data from the field for each of these charts<br>so that you can see the graph in its natural form. If you're an expert in<br>one of these fields and found a mistake or have feedback,<br>please reach out.

All charts are made with Plotly, of course.

Enjoy.

Wind Rose (Meteorology, Wind Energy)

Iowa Mesonet ASOS<br>· Des Moines (DSM) · 2023 ·<br>Code

Skew-T log-P (Aviation, Meteorology)

Iowa Mesonet raob API<br>· station OUN Norman · 2024-05-12 · standard-atmosphere fallback ·<br>Code ·<br>Explanation

Texture Triangle (Soil Science)

ISRIC WoSIS global soil horizons<br>· Code

Piper Diagram (Hydrogeology)

USGS Water Quality Portal<br>· Bernalillo County, NM · Piper construction after<br>Utah Geological Survey, WellApplication<br>· Code

Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram<br>(Astronomy)

HYG star catalog v41<br>· after<br>Wikipedia’s HRDiagram<br>· Code

Spectrogram (Seismology)

IRIS FDSN<br>· IU.ANMO BHZ · M9.1 Tōhoku · 2011-03-11 ·<br>Code

Spectrogram (Astrophysics)

LIGO GWOSC<br>· H1 strain · GW150914 · 2015-09-14 ·<br>Code

Smith Chart (RF Engineering)

scikit-rf ring-slot resonator<br>· W-band 75–110 GHz · Touchstone S1P ·<br>Code

Control Chart<br>(Manufacturing Quality Control)

NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook · MAVRO.DAT<br>· filter-transmittance series ·<br>Code

Levey-Jennings Chart<br>(Clinical Lab Quality Control)

NIST MAVRO.DAT Filter Transmittance (n=50)<br>· Code

Pareto Chart (Quality Control)

SF Open Data · 311 Cases<br>· May 2026 · Code

Candlestick + Volume (Trading)

Yahoo Finance<br>· AAPL daily OHLCV · 1 year · via yfinance ·<br>Code

Yield Curve (Fixed Income)

US Treasury<br>· daily par yield curve rates · 1990–2025 · Credit: Aisch & Cox,<br>NYTimes<br>· Code

Waterfall (Corporate Finance)

Apple FY2024 10-K<br>· fiscal year ended Sep 28, 2024 · hardcoded from filing ·<br>Code

Lorenz Curve (Economics)

World Bank<br>· US income quintile shares · SI.DST.FRST/02ND/03RD/04TH/05TH.20 ·<br>Code

Lorenz Attractor (Chaos Theory)

Synthetic · Lorenz (1963) σ=10, ρ=28, β=8/3 ·<br>Code

Funnel Chart (Sales & Marketing)

FunnelAnalysis<br>· e-commerce stage CSVs (home → search → payment → confirmation) ·<br>Code

Gantt Chart (Project Management)

plotly/datasets · GanttChart.csv<br>· Code

Population Pyramid (Demography)

California Dept. of Finance<br>· population projections by age, sex, and race ·<br>Code

Sankey Diagram (Energy)

LLNL Energy Flow Charts<br>· United States Energy Consumption 2023 · 93.7 quads · transcribed from<br>chart ·<br>Code

Kaplan-Meier Curve (Clinical Trials)

Rdatasets / survival::cancer<br>· NCCTG lung cancer trial ·<br>Code

Volcano Plot (Genomics)

reneshbedre.github.io<br>· rice RNA-seq differential expression ·<br>Code

Poincaré Plot (Cardiology)

RHRV-team/RHRVBook · Chapter 6<br>· R-R interval series · Code

Cohort Retention Heatmap<br>(Product Analytics)

UCI Online Retail<br>· invoice transactions · 2010–2011 ·<br>Code

Latency Percentile Bands<br>(Observability)

Microsoft Azure Public Dataset<br>· Azure Functions 2021 invocation trace ·<br>Code

Latency Heatmap (Observability)

Microsoft Azure Public Dataset<br>· Azure Functions 2021 invocation trace ·<br>Code

Commit Punchcard (DevOps)

GitHub API · plotly/plotly.js<br>· commit punchcard stats ·<br>Code

Commit Activity Heatmap (DevOps)

GitHub API · plotly/plotly.js<br>· weekly commit activity ·<br>Code

Flame Graph (Performance Engineering)

brendangregg/FlameGraph<br>· folded-stack format · synthetic web server profile ·<br>Code

Network Waterfall (Web Performance)

Chrome HAR format<br>· synthetic page load · DNS/connect/SSL/send/wait/receive phases ·<br>Code

Daily Temperature Range (Meteorology)

Open-Meteo archive API<br>· New York City · 2024 ·<br>Code

Open-Meteo<br>· San Francisco · 7-day observed + 5-day forecast · live ·<br>Code

Growth Chart (Pediatrics)

CDC LMS Weight-for-Age (Girls 2–20 yr)<br>· Code

Audiogram (Audiology)

NHANES 2017-18 Audiometry (n=3,131)<br>· Code

ECG Strip (Cardiology)

PhysioNet MIT-BIH Record 100 (Lead II)<br>· Code

Swimmer Plot (Oncology)

Rotterdam Breast Cancer Dataset (n=50 sample)<br>· Code

Well-Log Strip Plot (Petrophysics)

andymcdgeo/Petrophysics-Python-Series (GitHub)<br>· Code

Borehole...