Edward Tufte's book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is a classic that is still relevant today. It was written before Excel charts etc but the key concepts, especially "less ink is better", is something that everyone should subscribe to. It also contains my favourite chart which is Charles Joseph Minard representation of Napleons march (and subsequent retreat) to Russia. It shows the size of the army, relevant to location and temperature.
Actually, the key point is not that less ink is better -- the idea is that every bit of ink should be as information-dense as possible, in order to communicate the points desired.
"Less ink" leads to people dumbing down plots for bad reasons. Or in the interest of "clean design" making charts that are uninformative.
Charts should be very detailed when they need to be. But the information should reveal and help the reader to draw conclusions visually, not obfuscate.
He gives these examples, which are highly detailed, and dense in information. Every piece of ink is informative, yet at multiple levels of viewer "zoom" there are meaningful takeaways that can be identified:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png