Edward Tufte’s books are an enjoyable reference on information design and visualization. His concepts on data-ink ratio and analyis of historical maps, brochures and illustrations were a revelation on how less can be more.
Some of Tufte’s ideas such as sparklines have seen widespread usage in presenting analytics and trends. Less used, and perhaps less-catchily-named is the slopegraph.
Charlie Park has a great post about it, with some examples in the wild, along with the nuances of labeling and automatically generating slopegraphs.
Envisioning information is an art, requiring deep and intuitive understanding of the data and presentation goals. A website can today generate and sprinkle sparklines like text in a web page. There are several attempts at automating slopegraph generation.
Large amounts of data is now publicly available, along with the tools to structure and collate it. Some even provide visualization widgets. A service that connects unfolding events with appropriately selected visual information would be helpful. All one asks of such a service is that it not perpetuate chartjunk.
Stay posted on stories, trends and topics of interest.