The NYT Approach to Busy Line Charts
November 29, 2025 • 4 min read
The New York Times tells us that the Global birth rates are collapsing, but not all at the same pace. Mexico plunged from about 7 children born to a woman in 1960 to around 2 today. The E.U. drifted from roughly 2 down to 1.5.
This chart tracks data from 60+ years and 15+ regions. And usually, plotting that amount of data gets really messy. I'm sure many of you can relate. But some clever design choices make this chart clear and easy to read.
Making the Story Easy to Read
Each country is labeled directly on its line instead of in a legend. You see "France" on the red line and "U.S." on the blue line etc..
This does two things:
- Save time for the audience: It's less work to read directly on the lines than to look back and forth to a legend.
- Makes the chart more accessible: Having the labels directly on the lines helps people with color blindness or other visual impairments.
Another interesting detail is the line thickness. In the bottom half of the chart, the clump of lines have some varying line thicknesses. EU has a thinner line (like the rest of the regions), and the line for the US thicker than the rest. This makes it easier to distinguish the data, although the US having a thicker line is probably primarily for the narrative of the article.
Directing Attention
NYT is plotting all these different stories, but they don't want you to focus on all of them equally. So they make a choice.
Six countries get bold, distinct colors. While the larger regions are gray. I'm not sure here why Hungary is also gray but its line thickness is bolder than the rest, enough to see it clearly.
Your brain separates colored from gray before you even consciously think about it. That's pre-attentive processing. The chart could have been visual spaghetti with 15 competing lines. Instead, color guides your attention to the stories that NYT wants you to focus on.
It’s a smart middle ground for their data storytelling: keep all the regions for context, but quiet them so they don’t compete. Highlight the few, group the rest, and let color guide the eye.
How they chose which countries to highlight and the biases that come with it is a different discussion, but from a data viz angle, it's a great example of using visual hierarchy to make busy data readable.
