Can We Improve on the Stacked Bar Chart?

Jonathan Schwabish acknowledges that stacked bars remain deeply familiar to audiences and sometimes familiarity wins. Their key insight? In several experimentations, those new designs felt disconnected or confusing, especially when the total looked like a separate series. Still, the piece is an open invitation to question norms and push for smarter charting – not to discard tried-and-true formats, but to refine our visual storytelling.