World Bank's Data Visualization Style Guide
Last updated: Mar 19th 2025
The World Bank visualization style guide describes design guidelines for creating legible, coherent and visually pleasing data visualizations.
The main objective of the data visualization style guide is to support you in creating visualizations. This style guide follows established perceptual principles and best practices in data visualization design to achieve a cohesive look of charts across the World Bank.
The color, typography, and layout specifications can be applied across different platforms and contexts. The guide offers structured guidance and basic building blocks based on well-established visualization design principles while allowing flexibility to create the best chart for your specific needs.
Colors
The new visualization design system provides an expressive and visually pleasing categorical, sequential, and diverging color sets while also extending the World Bank branding and building on established color conventions and rules of visual perception.
Typography & Text
Typography & Text section describes recommendations for fonts, font sizes, and text colors. Specifically, it lays out suggestions for the text in visualizations and a detailed description about how to format numbers. Text is scaled relative to the screen size in order to support a great experience across devices. Text colors are chosen to achieve sufficient background contrast for light and dark text as well as for text in category colors.
Chart Elements
The visualization style guide follows a modular approach with consistently styled elements such as grids and legends working seamlessly across different chart types. This section on chart elements also describes elements such as titles, subtitles, notes, and spacing around the charts.
Chart Types
In this section, the definition from the previous pages come together for the most common chart types such as line charts, scatterplots, beeswarms and bar charts. We also describe implementations of the style guide in Flourish and R.
Tools & Examples
The World Bank data visualization style guide has been adapted in Flourish and used in some other World Bank publications. Here you can see some examples in action and find templates to adapt for your own purposes. See how the style guide is implemented across different libraries and tools and find existing impementations e.g. as R packages and Flourish templates. We are also working on additional implementations which will be added once completed.
Acknowledgements
Alice Thudt | Creative Direction and Design
Maarten Lambrechts |
Implementation of tools and R package author
Please contact him at mlambrechts@worldbank.org for any questions related to the wbplot R package.
Divyanshi Wadhwa | Editor
Please contact her at dwadhwa@worldbank.org for any questions related to Flourish.
We gratefully acknowledge feedback and guidance from World Bank's Information Technology Services team (ITS), Development Data Group (DECDG), and External Communications and Relations team (ECR).