I had a college Statistics professor who would get triggered and go off on a (justified) rant every time he saw a 3D pie chart.

I am a big advocate or arranging the pie slices in order (largest to smallest, or smallest to largest).

I also really recommend The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures https://www.amazon.com/Street-Journal-Guide-Information-Grap...

For people interested in this kind of stuff there's a good book on visualizations from WSJ: https://www.amazon.com/Street-Journal-Guide-Information-Grap...

It's pretty concise and full of helpful rules like that

I've been learning this stuff for work some. I've found that Good Charts: The HBR Guide to making Smarter More Persuasive Data Visualizations[1] to be helpful.

Also the Wall Street Guide to Info Graphics[2] is a good 'recipe' book for graphs/charts.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Good-Charts-Smarter-Persuasive-Visual... 2. https://www.amazon.com/Street-Journal-Guide-Information-Grap...

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...