My favorite coverage of the topic (well, "favorite" maybe has the wrong connotations....the BEST coverage I've seen) is in Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations. Tufte teaches about making effective presentation graphics, and he uses some of the actual diagrams used by the engineers to try to convince management there was a problem to illustrate how not to make a convincing argument from data that could have been used more effectively, and then what he would have recommended the presentation look like.