The chart at the top of an FT homepage, or the centrepiece of an NYT Upshot piece, looks the way it does because it follows a tight production recipe. The recipe is not secret. Studying their pages and reverse-engineering the choices is the fastest path to producing publication-grade work yourself — in Excel, in Tableau, in Power BI, in anything.
The anatomy
- Top header strip: small caps category ('TRADE' or 'CLIMATE'), often in the publication's accent colour.
- Action title: bold, ~16-20pt, makes the claim.
- Deck (sub-title): lighter, ~10-12pt, gives the metric, time period, geography.
- Chart proper: minimal axes, sparing gridlines, one accent colour against muted others.
- Inline annotation: on the one or two data points the action title hinges on.
- Source note: ~8-9pt italic grey, attribution + date.
- Footer: publication brand mark, page reference, sometimes a 'methodology' link.
The 80/20 of publication polish
Spend 80% of your design effort on the action title and the annotation. They produce 80% of the gap between an analyst chart and a publication chart. The rest — palette, type, source line — takes ten minutes and makes the chart look intentional.
Recipes worth copying
FT: heavy on dark blue (#003C71), accent in sky blue or coral. Action title in serif (Financier Display). Charts often square or wider-than-tall. Source line at bottom-left, page metadata bottom-right.
Economist: warm red (#E3120B) as the primary accent. Bold sans-serif (Econ Sans). Action title is a deck of 2-3 lines, not a single line. Charts heavily annotated with arrow callouts.
NYT Upshot: minimal palette, often single dark grey for primary series. Heavy reliance on annotation; sometimes 5-6 inline labels per chart. White background, near-zero chartjunk. Cherrypicks small multiples for cross-region comparisons.
A pre-publication checklist
- Is the title an action title? Does it make a single claim?
- Does the chart's design point at the data the title depends on?
- Have I removed all gridlines I don't need? Lightened the rest to 20% grey?
- Is there exactly one accent colour against a muted background?
- Does the chart have a source line? Is the source actually credible?
- Have I tested for colour-blind viewers? (Color Oracle browser extension.)
- Have I looked at the chart on a phone? Is it still legible?
Reverse-engineer monthly
Pick one FT, Economist, or NYT chart a month. Recreate it from scratch in your tool of choice. The exercise teaches you what those publications do with palette, hierarchy, and annotation that you don't yet. Within a year, your charts will look noticeably more like theirs.
Exercise
Pick the chart you're proudest of from your last six months of work. Apply the pre-publication checklist. Which items fail? Spend 20 minutes fixing only those items. Compare the before and after side by side. How much of the 'publication-grade' feel comes from changes that took minutes?