Not A Good Idea: Placing the Legend on either sides of the chart when it contains long legend item labels can cause problems as shown below. The long text labels push the bars which scales the chart content to become smaller. In turn it causes the bottom labels to overlap each other making them hard to read.

Not A Good Idea: Displaying multiple datasets in rows is a problem as the first data set will cover the second dataset.

Not A Good Idea: This example shows a chart with different fonts and font sizes together with a harsh gridline that makes it distracting and disrupting. The design pulls the eye away from the information the chart is attempting to show.

You may have read about CDL on our site and in the documentation and wondered what it is and stands for. Our Chart Definition Language or CDL is a collection of plain text parameters that describe a chart.

Not A Good Idea: Keeping the chart layout as vertical where the bars stand upright can be a problem if you have very long labels. As the example demonstrates below, the long labels overlap each other, get cut off and makes the chart hard to read.

Not A Good Idea: Adding excessive 3D depth on a chart will make it difficult to accurately read the true value. For example on this Combo chart, the bar value of Label 1 is 10 but at a quick glance the value appears to be 15 due to the depth angle of the bars.

A new and really cool chart feature that we introduced in 7.0 is the capability to add drop shadows. You can now enhance the look of the chart to simulate 3D depth for some really eye catching charts. I find myself using this new param all the time in order to give my charts a little more depth.

In our current 7.0 release we included many new cool chart features, one of them is the Highlight param. It basically allows you to add a different types of pattern fills to produce multiple effects. It’s similar to the FillPattern param but offers much more control. One particular effect that’s possible to do, is to simulate the shine of a light source.

Creating templates with an over styled look for those eye catching one off examples and showcase galleries are great for that initial wow factor. However, the eye catching parts of the chart may also be a bit too much and they end up being distracting.

Sometimes it’s hard to find that one particular color or set of colors that fit just right. You may also want to try other colors than the defaults.