Like the mountains need Sherpas, great stories need Guides

You have probably seen the most famous paintings or photographies or statues and was immediately caught by the story around them. Why?

Because they guided you directly to it. Concepts like the Golden Ratio and the Rule of Thirds have been known for thousands of years and are used almost everywhere.

The golden ratio guides you through clear, pleasing proportions that lead the viewer’s gaze to one point, rather than letting it wander across the whole canvas. Try Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. A chart can do the same thing. Put your key number where the spiral would converge — the upper third, slightly off-center — and the eye finds it first, before it’s even read a label.

The Rule of Thirds tells painters and photographers not to put the object dead center. They mentally divide the frame into thirds in both directions and place the important thing on one of the four intersecting lines. It may look off-balance. It doesn’t. A perfectly centered subject feels static, like a passport photo. Try to see some examples here.

A subject sitting a third of the way in feels like it’s part of a scene, mid-story, inviting the eye to keep moving. Charts follow the same instinct without most people noticing. The bar that matters doesn’t have to be the tallest one in the middle; sometimes just placing it a third of the way across the page, rather than dead center, is enough to make it feel like the natural place to look first.

You can have the right data and the right chart type and still lose your audience. Correct and clear are two different things. If every bar looks the same size, every color carries equal weight, and nothing on the page tells the eye where to start, the reader has to do the work your chart was supposed to do.

If you remember nothing else from this tip: a chart without a starting point is a chart your reader has to solve instead of read.

This is from the series of TOP 30 Tips in Data Storytelling.

“If everything in your visual shouts, the insight whispers.”

Technically correct, visually failing

A chart can have accurate data, the right chart type, and zero decoration, and still fail at its one job. Nothing about it is wrong. It’s just flat — every element asking for the same amount of attention, which in practice means none of them get any.

Visual hierarchy is the fix, and it costs nothing extra to add. Size, color, and placement are tools for telling the eye where to look first, second, and last. Without them, a reader has to manually scan and compare every bar before finding the point — work your chart should have done for them.

I go deeper into highlighting and zooming in TIP 7.

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Not all numbers are created equal. A 0.5% variance in stationery costs doesn’t deserve the same visual weight as a 3‑point drop in margin. A covenant‑risk breach shouldn’t be presented in the same font, size, and color, yet most financial decks do just that. Without visual emphasis, your CFO or BU leader must hunt for the important bits. This increases cognitive load. It makes it more likely they’ll miss the main point or tune out entirely.

Color is one of the fastest ways to convey meaning in a chart, but in many corporate decks, it’s treated like confetti rather than a storytelling tool. 

When every bar, line, and KPI splashes a different hue, nothing stands out, the key message disappears, and your audience has to work harder to find the point. 

Used deliberately, though, color can guide attention, signal risk vs. opportunity, and make your visuals consistently clear wherever you are, across finance, operations, and sales.

More on this topic in TIP 10: Use Color Strategically

All of the core principles are described in my simple training for anyone: The Curious Beginner.

Let’s move on to another relevant example.

Notice what both fixes have in common. Neither example changed a single number. Neither picked a different chart type. Sorting and one color change did all the work, the data was always there, waiting for something to point at it.

How to Guide the Eye Without Overdoing It

Visual hierarchy has its own failure mode: using it everywhere until nothing stands out again. If every bar is a different color or every label is bold, you’re back to where you started: a chart with no starting point, just louder.

Two checks worth running before you call a chart done:

• Is there exactly one thing the reader should see first? If you can’t name it in one phrase, the hierarchy isn’t built yet.
• Would removing every highlight except one still tell the story? If the answer is no, you’re relying on decoration to do a job that sorting and emphasis should be doing instead.

Guiding the eye is not about adding more. It’s about deciding, on purpose, what gets the reader’s attention first and letting everything else stay quiet so that decision matters.

Summary – From insights to action

A chart fails when nothing tells the reader where to look, even with perfectly correct data. Size, color, and order are free — they cost nothing to add and nothing to compute — and they’re the difference between a chart someone reads in five seconds and one they give up on.

Before you finalize your next chart, ask what one thing you want someone to notice first, then make sure something on the page such as: a color, a size, a position, points there. Do this consistently, and readers stop working to find your point. They just see it.

Don’t forget to try the free 10 Step Training for Curious Beginner here.

For free resources to help you on your Data Storytelling Journey, click here.

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