Two kinds of charts
There are two very different kinds of information visualizations. And I don’t have pies and bars in mind.
The first kind is for presenting the knowledge. You have already discovered some interesting facts and now need to present them clearly to the reader. Your task is to design a most appropriate form for the data, that the knowledge will become obvious. (Of course, you should not be dishonest and lie to a reader by making perspective distortions or shifting the zero point.) Sometimes you may even drop the figures and just show the data geometrically. The charts should have little noise: no lines, no ticks, no labels. Curves can be smooth and some nice 3D effects can be applied. Present as little data as necessary. Prefer geometric objects to tables.
The second kind is for discovering the knowledge. You have raw data and no particular idea about what could be so interesting about it. In such case you need a format which lets you discover the knowledge. Comparing to the first kind of visualization, here you might want to have more additional information, most probably an interactive table or graph to play with. Add some additional hints: the mesh, absolute and relative values, confidence intervals etc. Of course, this form should be much more honest and complete than the presentation of a first kind. No special effects, no smooth curves. Prefer tables and simple charts to fancy geometric objects.
When presenting a data, first thing to do is to decide what kind of problem do you solve. If you present a raw data, make it easy to work with it and find the knowledge. If you have already found a knowledge, present it in the most clear form.