With similar objectives, Edward Tufte achieved contemporary fame in data viz with his approach to presentation that can be stated simply: less is more. Tufte taught and demonstrated that in charts, anything other than the barest of axis and label - any ornamentation beyond basic data - detracts from the presentation through distraction and ambiguity. https://stanfordmag.org/contents/intelligent-designs https://www.ed…
Tufte can be quite dogmatic and not all of his principles should be taken as gospel at all times (then again, nothing should, probably). But one thing that stood out to me is that some of his examples remind you not to get too smart — just put the labels directly with what they label, annotate directly on the graph, etc., the kind of stuff you can easily forgot to do when the default is to just use chart templates in whatever software your data lives.