Envisioning Information, by Edward R. Tufte

I can’t decide if I like Tufte’s work or not. The ideas presented are thought provoking and the images capture your attention like few works I’ve ever seen; however, the attitude that comes through his writing reminds me of the worst of my college professors. I suppose in the idea of not shooting the messenger I should give him a pass because the message itself is strong. This book talks about how to best display information, especially lots of information in a small amount of space. I personally find cartography fascinating and there are plenty of maps to be found here. Color is another topic that is covered but could use an update in my opinion; in our new supposedly accessible world Section 508 is becoming more important but ignored in this text. Like Tufte’s other works I’d recommend this one, for the pictures if nothing else. Visually amazing.

First Sentence:

Even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of three spatial dimensions and reason occasionally about higher dimensional arenas with mathematical ease, the world portrayed on our information displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality of the endless flatlands of paper and video screen.

Visual Explanations, by Edward Tufte

The text is intellectual snobbery, but the images are fantastic. To be fair, Tufte makes really good points about how to effectively use visuals of all sorts (charts, reports, maps, fonts, etc.) but the tone is pretentious. Tufte believes that one should not talk down to an audience, and he certainly doesn’t here. For example, from page 116: "Multiple versions of these prankish glasses reinforce the perception that what we have here is not merely a one-time lapse but rather a chronic silliness—just as the multiple views of the multiple Watergate defendants intensify the atmosphere of feloniousness." Not exactly Dr. Seuss, eh?

That said, the pictures are so compelling I spent at least an hour just thumbing through the book before starting to actually read it! My favorite chapter was Explaining Magic: Pictorial Instructions and Disinformation Design. The rest of the book is describes how important images are, but this chapter is about magic and the corruption of visual information. Fascinating stuff. The single most compelling image, however, is the visual history of rock and roll presented on pages 90 and 91; I couldn’t find a copy online, but a snippet can be seen in the background here. This diagram grabs my attention each and every time I see it.

First Sentence:

Our thinking is filled with assessments of quantity, an approximate or exact sense of number, amount, size, scale.