I just got back from an Edward Tufte one day seminar yesterday. Below is just a transcription of my notebook. In the following weeks, I’ll highlight a few points. In the mean time, I suggest you attend a course if you can. It comes with four of his books. Otherwise, read them, they’re full of insightful thoughts.
- The long-term goal is to zero out the interface. It’s all about the content or subject matter.
- A good diagram should be read carefully as you would with a paragraph of words.
- Don’t pre-specify a method (e.g., don’t go in to a problem saying you’ll visualize it).
- Study maps, it uses lines, colors, words, and layers. No more putting boxes around words. It creates optical clutter.
- Supergraphics, or figures that contain many dimensions of data, allows the audience time to work with their own cognitive styles.
- Presentations should start with a high resolution data dump, a supergraphic.
- Use your own time for the audience to read your material. Don’t expect them to read it on their own time.
- Create a technical brief, rather than slides. It should be a Word document, or your preferred document editor. Hand this out ahead of time and give the audience time to read it. The presenter is then cross-examined.
- Create complete integration of information.
- Use sparklines. They can be inserted anywhere, particularly in text. Stop labeling everything figure, title, and caption. It’s just clutter.
- Don’t design to the lowest common denominator. Expect the best, not the worse, in your audience.
- Reports, graphs, and charts can have the level of complexity of the sports section in the newspaper.
- Find good examples and copy them.
- For non-fiction reports, mimic the tables in the sports section or the market data presented in newspapers. They’re proven.
- The job of the customer is not to design the product.
- Show mastery of detail. If you want clarity, add detail. It sound contrary but works.
- The point of an information display is to promote thinking.
It's nice to get someone else's review on Tufte's seminar. One of my coworkers who went works as a Ad Operations Analyst and didn't appreciate the Tufte seminar. We also just implemented sparklines in our company SEO software which I think is great for our end users.
Not everyone appreciates Tufte. He doesn't teach you how to do anything. It's not a step 1, step 2, step 3 how-to guide. Instead, he shows great design principles. There's also a split between the cartoony infographics and the data intensive dense Tufte design. I personally prefer the latter.