Good chart design and dashboard design can become more challenging when you do not know in advance what the data and labels are.

The following post does a nice job showing how rotating a bar chart helps support larger data babels, using real examples.

See storytelling with data: some finer points of data visualization.

The post by Jeffrey Schaffer also references 4 good tips for storytelling with data analytics which tie directly into not only chart design and the right ways to display your KPIs, but also dashboard design. They call it “The Shaffer Four C’s of Data Visualization.”