My colleague, Chares Earl, pointed me to this interesting 2010 post that explores different ways to visualize categories of drastically different sizes.
The post author, Tom Hopper, experiments with different ways to deal with “Data Giraffes”. Some of his experiments are really interesting (such as splitting the graph area). In one experiment, Tom Hopper draws bar chart on a log scale. Doing so is considered as a bad practice. Bar charts value (Y) axis must include meaningful zero, which log scale can’t have by its definition.
Other than that, a good read Graphing Highly Skewed Data – Tom Hopper
Boris Gorelik 