Designing Effective Graphs is the title of a paper written by Edward W. (Jed) Frees and Robert B. Miller in 1998. It is available (to members of the Society of Actuaries and others) here. It was also published as a chapter in the book Regression Modeling with Actuarial and Financial Applications.
Here are some videos that summarize this paper. They are in both "flash" and "streaming" formats. Streaming videos are great because they play relatively quickly on virtually every device. Flash is also terrific, as it allows us to provide features such as close-captioning and a table of contents. Sadly, Apple and many tablet products do not support the "flash" video content.
With the technology we are using to produce these videos, we can't do both at the same time. So, we give you a choice as to which you prefer.
Here are the supporting overheads for the videos
You can learn how to make these graphs using R at the Graphical Software Scripts section of the book website.
For those without R, here is a link that will allow you to construct many, but not all, of the graphs using Sagecell (requires Firefox browser).