Sebastian Sauer has a two-parter on waffle plots. The first part is an introduction:
A waffle diagram is a variant of (stacked) bar plots or pie plots. They do not have great perceptual properties, I’d suspect, but for some purposes they may be adequate. This is best explored by example. This post draws heavily from the introduction of hrbrmstr to his Waffle package.
The second part uses emojifont to show pictograms as well:
A Pictogram may be defined as a (statistical) diagram using icons or similar “iconic” graphics to illstrate stuff. The waffle plot (see this post) is a nice object where to combine waffle and pictorgrams. Originally, this post was inspired by HRBRMSTR waffle package, see this post, but I could not get it running.
Maybe the easiest way is to work through an example (spoiler: see below for what we’re heading at).
This type of plot doesn’t work for everything, but I can think of a few places where it’d be the right choice.