A curated collection of tools, books, blogs, and inspiration to help you communicate your data more effectively. Updated periodically.

Jump to: DataViz Tools · DataViz Books · DataViz Blogs · Storytelling Books · Presentation Books · Books About the Brain · Presentation Tools · Presentation Blogs · Presentation Templates · Color Tools · Color Contrast Tools · Font Tools · Icon Collections · Image Collections · Video Editing Tools

Data Visualization

DataViz Tools

• D3.js — JavaScript library for producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers
• Datawrapper — Create interactive data visualizations in a drop-and-drag framework, built for journalists
• Excel — Organize, format, and calculate data with spreadsheet tools
• Flourish — Charting library for simple to advanced interactive data visualizations
• HighCharts — JavaScript charting library for adding interactive charts to websites
• Infogram — Create infographics, presentation slides, and data visualizations in a drop-and-drag interface
• JMP from SAS — Interactive charting and data analysis connected to SAS
• Juicebox — Interactive, web-based data storytelling platform for businesses
• P5.js — JavaScript library making coding accessible for artists, designers, and educators
• Plotly — Declarative charting library with more than 20 chart types including 3D and statistical graphs
• PowerBI — Cloud-based business analytics service from Microsoft for dashboards and interactive reports
• Processing — Flexible open source software sketchbook for learning to code in visual arts contexts
• Python — Interpreted, high-level programming language widely used for data analysis and visualization
• RAW Graphs — Open source framework bridging spreadsheet applications and vector graphics editors
• Qlik — Business intelligence software for data visualization, guided analytics, and reporting
• R — Programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics
• Tableau — Interactive data visualization software focused on business intelligence
• Vega — Visualization grammar for creating, saving, and sharing interactive visualization designs
• Vizzlo — Business graphics and infographics in a drop-and-drag interface

DataViz Books

• Alberto Cairo, The Functional Art — How to use statistical charts, maps, and diagrams to spot stories in data
• Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art — How to work with data, discover stories, and share them through charts and maps
• Jorge Camoes, Data at Work — How to think about and organize data using skills you already have in Excel
• Stephen Few, Now You See It — Simple, practical means to explore and analyze quantitative data visually
• Stephen Few, Show Me the Numbers — Comprehensive guide to designing tables and graphs to enlighten
• Andy Kirk, Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data Driven Design — Step-by-step process for achieving great data visualization
• Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Storytelling with Data — Fundamentals of data visualization and effective data communication
• Isabel Meirelles, Design for Information — Critically examines design solutions to help solve specific visualization problems
• Nathalie Riche et al, Data-Driven Storytelling — Accessible introduction to data-driven storytelling from researchers and journalists
• Naomi Robbins, Creating More Effective Graphs — Basic knowledge and techniques for choosing and creating appropriate graphs
• Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — The classic book on statistical graphics, charts, and tables
• Dona Wong, The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics — How to choose the best chart, use color effectively, and communicate with decision makers
• Nathan Yau, Visualize This — Step-by-step tutorials for visualizing and telling stories with data

DataViz Blogs

• Alberto Cairo — Short posts on data visualization and data journalism
• Andy Cotgreave — Discussions about the data visualization field and Tableau tutorials
• Kaiser Fung / Junk Charts — Critiques and redesigns of poorly designed data visualizations
• Ben Jones / Data Remixed — Broader views on current data visualization trends and practices
• Andy Kirk / Visualising Data — Current developments and highlights from the field
• Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic / Storytelling with Data — Practical instructions on creating visualizations that tell stories
• Robert Kosara / EagerEyes — Academic focus highlighting and reviewing research from the data visualization field
• Andy Kriebel / VizWiz — Data visualization and Tableau tutorials, co-manager of Makeover Monday
• Nathan Yau / Flowing Data — Daily reviews of data visualizations with tutorials in R and D3

Books on Storytelling

• Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots — Comprehensive answer to whether there are only a small number of basic stories in the world
• Jerome Bruner, Making Stories — How stories help us make sense of the world and the problems that animate them
• Shawn Callahan, Putting Stories to Work — A clear process for mastering business storytelling
• Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces — The Hero’s Journey and universal motifs of adventure and transformation
• Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace, Creativity Inc. — How to build a creative culture, from Pixar’s co-founder
• Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory — How shared memories make possible our most meaningful relationships
• Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics — How comics — and visual languages — work and how we understand them
• Robert McKee, Story — The most comprehensive explanation of the craft of screenwriting and story structure
• Will Storr, The Unpersuadables — How the stories we tell ourselves invisibly shape our beliefs
• Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan — How improbable events explain almost everything about our world
• John Yorke, Into the Woods — A historical, philosophical, and psychological journey to the heart of storytelling
• Harvey Sacks et al, Lectures on Conversation — Rules of conversational sequencing and storytelling in conversation

Presentations

Presentation Books

• Michael Alley, The Craft of Scientific Presentations — The assertion-evidence approach to scientific presentations
• Scott Berkun, Confessions of a Public Speaker — Techniques behind great communicators and how anyone can use them
• Matt Carter, Designing Science Presentations — Creating compelling science communication for researchers and graduate students
• Nancy Duarte, Resonate — Building a strong connection with your audience and leading them to action
• Nancy Duarte, slide:ology — Visual story development with inspirational design and case studies
• Carmine Gallo, Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs — Point-by-point techniques from Steve Jobs’ legendary presentations
• Carmine Gallo, The Storyteller’s Secret — Keys to telling powerful stories that inspire, motivate, and educate
• Carmine Gallo, Talk Like TED — Nine secrets of all successful TED presentations
• Stephen Kosslyn, Better PowerPoint — Scientific principles for designing effective slides
• Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen — How to reach your audience through simplicity and storytelling
• Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen Design — How to design effective presentations with text, data, color, images, and video
• Robin Williams, The Non-Designer’s Design Book — Four principles of design for non-designers
• Robin Williams, The Non-Designer’s Presentation Book — Eight principles of good design as applied to digital presentations

Books About the Brain

• Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational — How we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate in predictable ways
• Ruth Clark & Richard Mayer, e-Learning and the Science of Instruction — Research-based guidelines for presenting content with text, graphics, and audio
• Amy Cuddy, Presence — How to access personal power and stop worrying about the impression you’re making
• Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit — Why habits exist and how they can be changed
• Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein — A yearlong quest to improve memory under the tutelage of top mental athletes
• Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal — Why humans live in landscapes of make-believe and how stories shape us
• Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick — The anatomy of ideas that stick and how to make yours stickier
• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow — The two systems that drive the way we think, from a Nobel Prize winner
• Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide — How the human mind makes decisions and how to make them better
• Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project — The extraordinary friendship of Kahneman and Tversky and their revolution in psychology
• John Medina, Brain Rules — How we learn, what sleep and stress do to our brains, and why multi-tasking is a myth

Presentation Tools

• Beamer — LaTeX package for creating slides, free and works on all major operating systems
• Google Slides — Free online presentation app with collaboration and sharing
• Haiku Deck — Simple app for creating slide decks with access to 40 million free images
• Keynote — Apple’s presentation tool, simple to create and deliver on Mac and iOS
• Kittl — Easy-to-use design platform with professionally designed infographic templates
• PowerPoint — Industry standard slide-based presentation tool
• Prezi — Zoomable canvas presentations for non-linear storytelling
• Reveal.js — HTML-based interactive slide decks with nested slides, Markdown, and PDF export
• Storydoc — Interactive B2B presentations, proposals, and pitch decks with engagement tracking
• Sway — Microsoft’s free cloud app for presenting concepts onscreen rather than to an audience
• Xtensio — Presentation and collaboration tool with channel sharing and access control
• Zoho Show — Create, collaborate, present, and publish across multiple devices and browsers

Presentation Blogs

• Canva Design School — Advice on color, fonts, layout, and design with examples and resources
• Carmine Gallo — Real-world presentation examples from the business sector
• Ethos3 — Presentation delivery and slide design from a Nashville-based design company
• Empowered Presentations — Presentation design and consultation to communicate your message more effectively
• Indezine — PowerPoint tips, shortcuts, templates, and resources for the education community
• Presentation Genius — Tips and online training to improve slides and presentations
• Presentation Guild — Community of presenters and designers for better slide design and delivery
• Presentation Guru — Resources written by presentation experts from a variety of fields
• Presentation Panda — Simple and effective design techniques for presentations
• Presentation Xpert — Authors, webinars, and videos for creating and delivering better presentations
• Presentation Zen — Garr Reynolds on simplicity, storytelling, and design
• Presentitude — Presentation and information design with corporate presentation expertise
• Slide Rabbit — Tips and strategies for slide creation from a presentation design firm
• Think Outside the Slide — Business and financial presentations with technical slide creation guidance

Presentation Templates

• Diagrammer — Over 4,000 customizable diagrams using proximity, scale, and links to clarify hierarchy and relationships, with downloadable PowerPoint files.
• Get My Graphics — Affordable, professional graphics for business, training, education, and student projects.
• Graphue — A simple way to build great presentations.
• InfoDiagram — Thousands of editable icons and business diagram templates for PowerPoint, including data charts.
• My Product Roadmap — Strategy and planning templates covering product roadmaps, timelines, and investment planning.
• Nuts and Bolts Speed Training — Best practices and techniques for building and polishing PowerPoint decks quickly and efficiently.
• PosterMyWall — Create flyers, posters, social media graphics, and videos for marketing and business.
• PowerPoint Designer and Morph — Built into Office 2016+, these tools automate slide creation and add smart animation effects.
• Simple Slides — 10,000+ PowerPoint slides, infographics, and icons in one library.
• SketchBubble — Free and premium templates for PowerPoint and Google Slides, plus an AI presentation maker.
• SlideUpLift — Templates designed around vision science and storytelling principles for business presentations.

Design Tools & Collections

Color Tools

• Adobe Color — Generate themes for use in Adobe desktop and mobile apps
• Color Brewer — Select colors by number of data series, data type, and other attributes
• ColorCop — Free color picker for Windows identifying colors in hex code formats
• ColorDot — Simple color picker tool
• Color Hunt — Social platform for sharing curated color palettes in HEX codes
• Color.js — JavaScript library for making, modifying, and manipulating colors in a wide variety of color spaces
• ColourLovers — Creative community for sharing colors, palettes, and patterns
• ColRD — Tools to inspire your search for the perfect color
• Coolors — Create, save, and share color palettes
• Design Seeds — Nature-inspired color palettes for design inspiration
• Hero Patterns — Repeatable SVG background patterns for web and other projects
• Image Color Picker — Choose colors from an uploaded image or URL in HEX, RGB, and HSL
• Image LR — Choose colors from a photo in RGB and HEX formats
• Paletton — Custom color palettes with color vision deficiency simulation
• Picular — Google, but for colors — search a term and get color swatches
• Pigment by Shape Factory — Wide range of color selections with shades, tints, and combinations
• ColourCode — Free web-based all-in-one color design tool with palette categories and conversions
• uiGradients — Beautiful color gradients for designers and developers
• Viz Palette — Optimized for picking colors for data visualizations
• Wes Anderson Palettes — Color palettes based on stills from Wes Anderson films

Color Contrast & Accessibility Tools

• Accessibility Scanner — Android app suggesting improvements for touch targets, contrast, and content descriptions
• Adobe Color Contrast Checker — Foreground/background color contrast checker with WCAG scores
• Color Contrast Analyzer — Downloadable tool for PCs and Macs using WCAG guidelines with color vision deficiency simulator
• Contraste — Mac-only downloadable tool for checking text/background accessibility thresholds
• Color Contrast App — iPad accessibility checker using an eye dropper tool
• Color Contrast Checker — Free tool for testing foreground and background color contrast using HEX codes
• Color Oracle — Free color blindness simulator for Windows, Mac, and Linux
• Leonardo — Adobe project for creating accessible color systems for UI and data visualization
• Material.io Color Tool — Create and apply color palettes and measure accessibility levels
• Monsido Contrast Checker — Basic contrast checking with no downloads required
• Sim Daltonism — iOS app for visualizing colors as perceived with various types of color blindness
• Tanaguru Contrast Finder — RGB and HEX color input with contrast ratio adjustment and palette suggestions
• Vischeck — Simulates colorblind vision
• WebAIM — Simple HEX-based contrast checker returning pass/fail scores based on WCAG guidelines

Font Tools

• beau coup — Font Guide For All Occasions blog post with additional resources
• Creative Market — More than 12,000 fonts from designers around the world
• DaFont — Archive of freely downloadable fonts browsable by style, author, or popularity
• Font Squirrel — Collection of free fonts cleared for commercial use
• Font Yukle — No-frills font resource with many fonts available for free
• Fount — Identify web fonts on any site including size, weight, and style
• Google Fonts — Quick and easy web fonts for designers and developers
• My Fonts — Digital fonts distributor selling thousands of typefaces
• Typekit — Subscription font service with thousands of fonts from foundry partners
• Urbanfonts — Collection of free fonts, premium fonts, and dingbats
• 1001 Fonts — No-frills site for free and paid fonts

Icon Collections

• FlatIcon — Platform specializing in vector and editable icons
• Flat-Icons — Bundle of 20,000 unique, customizable icons with free lifetime updates
• Freepik — Search engine of free vector designs for personal and commercial projects
• Graphic Burger — Premium quality design resources including exclusive PSD files
• Icon Archive — Tag-based icon search engine with more than 500,000 icons
• IconMonstr — Free, high quality source of simple icons
• IconFinder — World’s largest collection of premium icons
• Icons8 — Crowd-sourced icons inspired by UI/UX professionals
• The Noun Project — Copyright-free symbols created and uploaded by graphic designers worldwide
• Pastel Pad — Free images, clipart, and illustrations for blogs and social media
• SquidInk — Handcrafted flat, line, and glyph icons, easy to customize and scale
• StreamlineIcons — Over 10,500 icons in three weights across 53 categories

Image Collections

• 500px Creative Commons — Premium photography with a separate Creative Commons section
• Artvee — Aggregates public domain art from major museums and libraries in one searchable location
• Blend — Leading multicultural commercial stock agency
• Flickr Creative Commons — Browse user-uploaded images licensed under Creative Commons
• FreeImages — Alternative to expensive stock photography for creative people
• FreePhotos — Aggregates Creative Commons photos from multiple providers in one place
• Gratisography — Free high-resolution pictures for personal and commercial use
• iStock — Millions of hand-picked premium images at low prices from Getty Images
• Jopwell — Free stock photos featuring people of color
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Public domain artworks free to use for any purpose including commercial
• Negative Space — Free, high-resolution CC0 licensed photos for personal or commercial use
• New York Public Library — 870,000+ digitized items including prints, photographs, maps, and manuscripts
• Old Book Illustrations — Illustrations from old books in the public domain
• Pexels — High quality free stock photos under Creative Commons Zero license
• Pikwizard — Free images for commercial and noncommercial use
• Pixabay — Royalty free stock photos and videos, free to use for anything including commercial
• Shutterstock — Global marketplace for licensing images, videos, and music
• The Stocks — Single interface bringing together photos, colors, icons, videos, mockups, and fonts
• Unsplash — High-resolution free photos under CC0 license, no attribution required
• WOCinTech — Stock photos of women of color in tech, licensed Creative Commons Attribution

Video Editing Tools

• Adobe Express Video Editor — Online video editor for trimming clips, adding music, applying filters, and creating polished videos for social media and personal projects
• CapCut — Free video editor for creating short-form social content, with templates, effects, trending audio, and AI tools for auto-captions and background removal
• Camtasia — Screen recording and video editing tool designed for creating tutorials, presentations, and training videos
• DaVinci Resolve — Professional-grade desktop video editor with advanced color grading, audio tools, and visual effects; free version available
• Descript — Video and podcast editor that lets you edit audio and video by editing text transcripts; includes AI-powered tools for removing filler words, overdubbing, and generating captions
• FlexClip — Online video editor for creating and editing videos for small businesses, social media, and personal use
• InVideo — Online video creation platform for marketers, entrepreneurs, and small businesses, with an automatic text-to-video feature
• Motionbox — Online video editing tool for creators and teams, with easy GIF resizing and aspect ratio adjustment for social media formats
• RecordCast — All-in-one online screen recorder and video editor for capturing and sharing screen content
• Ssemble — Online collaborative video editor with project sharing, co-editing, and a plugin store featuring AI-powered tools including auto-subtitles, text-to-video, and background noise removal
• VEED.io — Easy-to-use online video editor with tools for cutting, cropping, adding music and text, and automatically generating subtitles