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Edward Tufte Talks information Design
BoredStiff writes "The Weekend Edition of NPR ran a story on Edward Tufte — the outspoken critic of PowerPoint presentations — he has been described by The New York Times as "The Leonardo da Vinci of Data." Since 1993, thousands have attended his day-long seminars on Information Design. Tufte's most recent book is filled with hundreds of illustrations that demonstrate one concept: good design is timeless, while bad design can be a matter of life and death."
Tufte is absolutely one of the world experts on presentation of design. We have absolutely strived to adopt his principles of data design and presentation in almost all of our work and its paid off in terms of data interpretability. My dissertation work was presented for two years in a row at our big vision meeting getting no attention until I used some of Tufte's principles in presentation of data and the third year I had several hundred of the worlds scientists in vision research gasping, oooohing and aaaahing. It was awesome. Of course Keynote and a cool animation of a degenerating retina helped, but still......
His books are required reading in our lab and I encourage everyone who is involved in presentation of data of any kind to spend some time with his books.
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Reading his thoughts on borders (scroll down) reminds one of a flaw of Wikipedia's HTML/CSS design. "Strong frames ... produce content-diminishing effects," says Tufte. I seldom see borders around tables or equations in textbooks, and it does look very clean. On the other hand, Wikipedia's CSS styles place borders and underlines superfluously about everything, from blocks of code, images and underneath headings. It seems the Wikipedia web designers try too much to make "pretty pages" when, to an academic eye they look ugly and cluttered.
Every page element should signify some meaning; a heading should be underlined to distinguish it, but only if it is not otherwise distinguished by font size, vertical whitespace or some other typesetting. One element variation should suffice, as long as it's a bold change. A table should have borders only if the data are unclear otherwise. It's sad that as useful as Wikipedia can be, it still suffers from so many flaws. Wikipedians could learn much from Tufte, or from any study of technical communication.
I imagine that many people will get on and post all sorts of breathless praise about Tufte. This is well deserved. His design sense is first-rate, but what's really impressive to me about him is his emphasis on intellectual honesty and detail.
...) that lives up to Tufte's ideas about maximizing data ink and minimizing junk. While I really admire the effects that Tufte and some of his acolytes achieve, quite frequently it seems that they achieve these effects by painstaking work in drawing or desktop publishing packages. More than once, I wince at some bit of graphics or interface that I've designed, thinking, "Damn, that's an embarrassing bit of work for someone who has read Tufte, but I just don't have the time or skills to fix it..."
:-) ), papers and books.
What I really would like to see is a new widget set (with lots of data presentation support - obviously most of the widgets should be quantitative displays) and a style written in some already well-supported widget set (Qt, Swing,
This makes it a lot harder for schlubs like me who don't really have skills in this area, and don't have time to develop them. Further, it makes it more or less impossible to achieve these sort of fine effects programmatically - I'd like to see interactive displays that are informed by his sort of design sense, not just nice presentations (using hand-outs, of course
If anyone is interested in this - or knows of systems that go any decent way in this direction - please post or e-mail me at:
geoff AT cs DOT usyd DOOOOT edu DoT au
(sorry about the stylized "dot" silliness, but something tells me that the traditional foo AT bar DOT com is probably already being mined by spammers - or will be soon).
I think the standard Tufte line on this, is that if a 'few words' are all you're going to get up there, then why not just say the words and leave the screen blank?
... or some low-information drivel like that.
As a side bonus, you'll get eye contact from your audience rather than the disconcerting experience of looking out at a sea of faces who are all looking slightly to one side, peering at:
- Standard Tufte line
* high-data essential
- Good to have eye contact
But on the whole I agree that PowerPoint isn't inherently evil if used as a way of doing a nice slide-show of reasonably detailed elements (graphs, pictures, movies). The only problem is that the resolution of projectors is still pretty wretched compared to printed graphs.
1) No matter what my company says, they get a white background presentation with a small logo in the bottom left corner of each slide. I refuse to use background templates of "company colors" 2) No crap on the borders. I can't stand the waste of space that borders use up. I would rather make my table 20% bigger than have a pretty pattern of lines off-setting the slide 3) Text titles no bigger than 36 font, text subject matter no smaller than 24 font 4) Preferably 1, if I must then 2 plots to a slide 5) No test describing the plots on the slide, I should be doing that 6) No bar charts! I hate bar charts 7) Bold primary colors, none of this 'earth shades' 8) Plots imported from a graphing package. I use Sigmaplot of Origin. Excel is the armpit of graphing.
Bottomline is that if you have to use sounds and animations to capture the audiences attention, you're not doing a good job as a presenter, or the audience is just plain not interested in your subject (which happens).
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Here's a link to a long interview with Tufte._ 5.pdf
:-)
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/s15427625tcq1304
The interviewer asked him about why he self-published:
"After moving to Yale University, I finished the manuscript in
1982. A publisher was interested but planned to print only 2,000
copies and to charge a very high price, contrary to my hopes for
a wide readership. I also sought to design the book so as to make
it self-exemplifying--that is, the physical object itself would
reflect the intellectual principles advanced in the book. Publishers
seemed appalled at the prospect that an author might
govern design."
So, here's a guy writing a book on how to present information and the publisher thinks he knows better. LOL. Naturally, Tufte chose to keep control of the process. In other words, we are to do as he does. (as opposed to do as he says.) This approach reminds me of a lecture our principal used to give. The lecture was on how to lecture. He gave seven different techniques. He delivered each technique by using that technique. This is what Tufte refers to as self-exemplifying. Our library doesn't know it yet but they are buying copies of his books.