Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.

So what can we expect? Which innovative ideas are already being used? And what are the most creative approaches to present data in ways we’ve never thought before?

I've personally used IBM's Many Eyes and I'm thankful they make such a service freely available.

Also, I secretly have a crush on Fernanda B. Viégas; one of the researchers that worked on Many Eyes. Oops, I guess it's not a secret anymore.

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches