Choosing a chart type

A race shows the same set of items measured repeatedly over time. They differ in what they emphasise.

Bar chart race — the familiar one, and the best default. Emphasises rank and overtakes. Best with ten to fifteen items.

Line chart race — emphasises trajectory rather than rank. Use when the shape of the history matters more than who is currently ahead.

Pie chart race — emphasises share of a total. Falls apart past about eight slices.

Bubble chart race — emphasises magnitude, with size doing the work instead of length.

Treemap race — emphasises composition and nesting, for part-of-whole data with categories.

Table chart race — the one to reach for when you have too many items for a bar race. It stays readable well past the point where bars stop being legible.

Advanced comparison is a static head-to-head between a small set of items, two to six, with rich per-item visuals. The story is "compare these few things in detail" rather than "watch this ranking change".

This type deserves more attention than it gets. It is consistently the type that teams overlook and then, once they find it, use constantly — it fits a large share of real business communication, where you are contrasting a handful of options rather than animating a leaderboard.

Each side is laid out with child elements, so it is the most designable type in the product.

Map chart race animates values across regions of a world, country, or region map.

For country or region datasets, bar + map chart race is usually the better pick: a map at the top showing the geographic distribution, a bar race below ranking the same entities. Viewers see both where and who is leading at once, from one dataset.

Advanced map chart race adds per-entity overlays — flags, labels, and values pinned to regions. Use it only when the standard map race is not expressive enough.

The combination types stack two synchronized charts driven by one spreadsheet — you are not maintaining two datasets.

Bar + line — current ranking on top, historical trajectory below. Use when both matter in the same shot.

Bar + pie — who is leading, plus share of total. Up to about eight entities. The pie sits in the corner where short bars leave the frame empty.

Double bar — two synchronized races side by side, for the same entities on two different metrics, like revenue against profit.

Tornado — two races back to back from a shared centre axis, like exports against imports. Best with ten items or fewer.

Double bar + line — a dense power-user layout for two metrics plus trends.

These types are widely under-used simply because people do not know they exist. If your team's work involves comparing two metrics, they are worth a look on day one.

Slideshow sequences slides with animated transitions, for narrative sequences that are not a single continuous race.

Chat history renders a messaging conversation as an animation.

Static infographics. Any chart type can be rendered as a single still frame instead of a video — one data point per entity, no animation, no intro or outro. Use it when you need an image for a slide deck or a social post rather than a video.