One of our early challenges (almost exactly two years ago!) focused on bar charts, and the results were both impressive and diverse. Submissions included standard horizontal and vertical bars, but also overlapping, diverging, and stacked variations. This proves how fundamental bar charts really are. They form the basis for many other boutique charts like waterfall, bullet, lollipop, and Gantt charts, to name a few. Just one of the many reasons we love them!

Beyond their versatility, bars can be a great choice to help people understand data. Bar charts are common, so chances are your audience won’t be intimidated and already knows how to read them. This chart type is also easy for people to process. Our eyes are pretty good at comparing lengths of things that are aligned to a common baseline. This means in a bar chart, it’s a straightforward process to identify the smallest or the largest bar. We can also see the negative space between varying heights of bars to compare the incremental difference between them. Because bar charts are both widely recognized and easy to read, we want to give you a chance to go back to basics this month and practice creating more of them.

Going back to basics does not mean your graph will be boring. Bars are incredibly diverse, so this month’s challenge has something for everyone. If you’ve been considering participating in SWD challenge but have hesitated in the past, this is the month to jump in! You can keep it simple—even if this isn’t your first challenge—by using standard vertical or horizontal bars. Because standard bars are available in most tools, you’ll save time monkeying around to create the graph and can instead spend it being thoughtful in the overall design (for example, practicing using color and words intentionally). Or if you want to take it up a notch, try a variation that is new to you. Finally, if you are one of the 85 people who participated in our previous bar challenge—push yourself to see how far you’ve come in two years—in what way will you tackle the bar chart challenge this time around?

Whether you decide to embrace the basic or go bold, there are only two rules this month: there have to be bars, and there has to be a zero baseline. When we use bars, we are visually encoding the data by length, so the entire range needs to be present to represent the data proportionally. For more on this, check out a post from our archives—an oldie, but a goodie.

So without further ado, let's bring on the bars...again!

the challenge

Pick a dataset that lends itself nicely to bars. Typically, this means categorical data (though binning continuous data can work, too). Whatever you decide, the goal is to build beautiful bars and share in our love of bar charts.

If you need help finding data, check out this list of publicly available data sources. Share your creation in the SWD community by February 29th at 4PM PST. If there is any specific feedback or input that you would find helpful, include that detail in your commentary.

related resources

Here are some additional examples for inspiration. There’s a ton of great work out there—much more than we’ve called out specifically here—this is a starting point, but certainly not a comprehensive list (if there are other great examples you’d like to share, feel free to include links in your submission commentary).

SWD posts:

Bars in the wild:

Alexander Waleczek’s post: When can a line be a bar?
Andy Kirk’s post: Five ways to...present bar charts
Flourish’s racing bar charts

Show the basic bar chart some extra love this month—bring on bountiful, beautiful bars!