Tufte: Envisioning Information

Last year I read a bunch of Edward Tufte books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, Beautiful Evidence, and The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. I found them compelling and ended up writing You've Got To See This for the Gurock Blog.

In the intervening year I've found ways to incorporate aspects of what I learned into my work: I've tried hard to remove the junk from my figures and charts; I've noted that when we're talking about how to talk about our data, something like small multiples can help us to visualise more of it more easily; I've encouraged members of my team to think about the difference between exploring data in a tool such as Excel, and presenting data in a chart produced by Excel.

After that experience, I thought it might be interesting to review the notes I took as I went through the books (which I did, and it was). Then I thought it might also be useful to share them (which I'm doing, and you can judge).

This short set of posts contain the quotes I took from each book, presented in the order that I happened to read them. Themes recur across the series, but the quotes don't necessarily reflect that; instead they show something of what I felt was interesting to me in the context of what I'd already read, what I already knew, and what I was working on at the time.

Beautiful Evidence
Envisioning Information
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
Visual Explanations

All of the books are published by Graphics Press and available direct from the author at edwardtufte.com. Particular thanks go to Šime for the loans and the comments.

--00--

Emaciated data-thin designs ... provoke suspicion — and rightfully so — about the quality of measurement and analysis. (p. 32)

Small multiples, whether tabular or pictorial, move to the heart of visual reasoning ... Their multiplied smallness enforces local comparisons with our eyespan. (p. 33)

We envision information in order to reason about, communicate, document, and preserve that knowledge ... (p. 33)

Standards of excellence for information design are set by high quality maps, with diverse, bountiful detail, several layers of close reading combined with an overview, and rigorous data from engineering surveys. (p. 35)

Simplicity of reading derives from the context of detailed and complex information, properly arranged. A most unconventional design strategy is revealed: to clarify, add detail. (p. 37)

If the visual task is contrast, comparison, and choice — as it so often is — then the more relevant information with eyespan the better. (p. 50)

Simpleness is another aesthetic preference, not an information display strategy, not a guide to clarity. What we seek instead is a rich texture of data, a comparative context, an understanding of complexity revealed with an economy of means. (p. 51)

One line plus one line results in many meanings — Josef Albers. (p. 61; image above)

The noise in 1 + 1 = 3 is directly proportional to the contrast in value (light/dark) between figure and ground. (p. 62)

Careful visual editing diminishes 1 +1 = 3 clutter. These are not trivial cosmetic matters, for signal enhancement through noise reduction can reduce viewer fatigue as well as improve accuracy of readings from a computer interface, a flight-control display, or a medical instrument. (p. 62)

The arrangement of many computer interfaces is similarly overwrought. (p. 64)

Information consists of differences that make a difference. (p. 65)

At the heart of quantitative reasoning is a single question: Compared to what? (p. 67)

Comparisons must be enforced within the scope of the eyespan, a fundamental point occasionally forgotten in practice. (p. 76)

The Swiss maps are excellent because they are governed by good ideas and executed with superb craft. Ideas not only guide work, but also help defend our designs (by providing reasons for choices) against arbitrary taste preferences. (p. 82; similar image above)

Noise is costly, since computer displays are low-resolution devices, working at extremely thin data densities ... at every screen are two powerful information-processing capabilities, human and computer. Yet all communication between the two must pass through the low-resolution, narrow-band video display terminal, which chokes off fast, precise and complex communication. (p. 89)
Images: Tufte, Archemind, Bücher

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