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Radar chart maker

Several axes radiating from a centre, one per dimension, with each item drawn as a closed shape — a profile you can compare at a glance.

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3Style it

Warming up the kitchen…
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What it is

A radar chart — also called a spider, web or star chart — gives each dimension its own spoke and plots an item’s score along each one. Joining the points makes a polygon, and comparing polygons shows where items are strong or weak.

✓ Use it when

  • You are comparing two to four items across five to ten dimensions measured on the same scale: player skills, product ratings, survey scores.
  • The overall profile matters more than exact values.

✗ Avoid it when

  • The dimensions use different scales — normalise them first, or use small bar charts.
  • You need precise comparisons — a grouped bar chart is easier to read.
  • There are more than four or five items: the shapes pile up.

Tips for a better chart

The maths

With n spokes at angles θk = 2πk/n, a value rk is drawn at (rk cos θk, rk sin θk). The polygon’s area is ½ · sin(2π/n) · Σ rkrk+1, which depends on the products of neighbouring values.

That formula is the radar chart’s trap: reorder the spokes and the area changes, even though the data hasn’t. Read the shape’s outline, not its size.

A little history

The German statistician Georg von Mayr is credited with the first star chart, in his 1877 book on regularities in social life (Mayr 1877). Star plots were revived for multivariate data in the 1970s and 1980s and described in Chambers, Cleveland, Kleiner and Tukey’s textbook Graphical Methods for Data Analysis (Chambers et al. 1983).

Questions

Spider chart, star chart, radar chart — which is right?

All three name the same chart.

References

  1. Mayr, G. von (1877). Die Gesetzmässigkeit im Gesellschaftsleben: Statistische Studien. Munich: R. Oldenbourg.
  2. Chambers, J. M., Cleveland, W. S., Kleiner, B. & Tukey, P. A. (1983). Graphical Methods for Data Analysis. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
  3. Friendly, M. & Denis, D. J. (2001). Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization. Web document.

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