Polished Dashboards with Recharts

Charts are one of my favorite ways to show product thinking. They immediately communicate scale, momentum, and health. More importantly, they reveal whether you care about clarity and UX, not just raw data.

Setup

• Built with Recharts, which gives a clean, modern baseline.
• Added line and bar series to show growth and comparison.
• Made it fully responsive — whether you’re on a big monitor or a phone, the charts resize gracefully.
• Polished with tooltips, labels, and gridlines that strike the right balance between detail and readability.

Challenges

The hardest part was design taste — picking colors, deciding where to show or hide labels, and avoiding clutter. It’s easy to make charts look noisy or “Excel-like.” The trick is restraint: fewer strokes, intentional whitespace, consistent type scale.

I also had to ensure the charts played nicely with dark mode. Recharts doesn’t ship with dark-aware defaults, so I wired up custom theme variables for axis lines and tooltip backgrounds.

Takeaways

What I love here is how charts showcase engineering + product sense in one go. They’re not just functional — they feel like part of a dashboard you’d actually want to use. And when someone interacts with them (hover, resize, toggle), they get that “oh, this is polished” moment.