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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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Wouldn't that describe pretty much every person who came across powerpoint and is not a manager?
I did about 5 months of powerpoint stuff in the army (after which i was released for mental health reasons.. =\), and from my experience powerpoint has no use other than make managers and commanders feel important.
Edward Tufte's site.
He got it right about Powerpoint that's for sure.
Gettysburg address in powerpoint: http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/
- Don't have anything to say and or
- Whose words aren't truthful
For these people in either or both the above categories, PowerPoint can be a huge g-dsend, allowing them to execute a praise-generating (or, sales-generating) presentation that, had the person followed Tufte's advice, would have (rightfully) bombed.PowerPoint: stretching Truth and Content since 1997.
People ready software, indeed. Lots of people have nothing to say or lie when they say it.
Example: the Vista project manager giving a status report on features implemented, bugs solved and milestones met (this needs "filler") and projections for hitting delivery dates (this needs "less than truthful"). PowerPoint to the rescue!
Seriously, though. In Tufte's world, those without something truthful to say simply would say nothing. I like that world. But, I live in the Internet Age and know that world, perfect as it is, does not exist.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
NPR ran a story on Edward Tufte -- the outspoken critic of PowerPoint presentations
Why is he described as outspoken when his opinion is in the majority?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
There was a radio story on NPR about Edward Tufte over the weekend, if you haven't listened to it yet.
-- memoid
Bad design is giving a program an insufferablely cute name that does absolutely nothing to describe its function. Like "TWiki". At best, the name of the program should be a very short two word description of the program's function and at worst, a metaphor of the program's function. In the above example, "TWiki" should be called "GroupEditor" or at worst, "BullPen".
But TWike like OggVorbis, is a ridiculous name that actually hurts the program by alienating people from exploring what it does after they see or hear the Program name referred to in some random context. Giving programs stupid names is a deep disfunction of the Linux/Open Source community. Seriously, we need to get over this.
Keynote, PowerPoint, or any other tool in the hands of the average human being could be catastrophic.
...In other news today GM announced it would include new dashboard functionality to make on the go changes to their new line of trucks. Drivers will now be able to inflate their tires to monster truck level instantaneously, add multiple high beam lights to their roll bars at no extra cost, display gun racks and fishing poles, whistle "dixie" with their horn...
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 should meet this guy, I regard myself as the Vincent Van Goch of data. There's nothing quite like a bottle of absinthe to help you put an artistic spin on that backup copy.
Even without that the site looks confusing and intimdiating at first look.
myspace page?
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
Don't forget this classic from The Onion.
GMD
watch this
No, it just means that iPods are going to be around for a long, long time.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The thing with PowerPoint style presentation software is that people are so damn FAMILIAR with it. Even if another design doesn't look as familiar, there's a fine line that one has to draw between interesting the viewers and shutting away their attention because they're unfamiliar with the design.
However, methinks that the GPP was more benefited by the crazy animations, anyway.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Have they an updated version of the Genesis chapter ready yet?
I believe that Tufte's biggest gripe with Powerpoint is that it encourages low information density. If you use the default templates you will have just a few bullet points on each slide and lots of space lost to border embellishments. But if you know what you're doing, then you can put much higher information content into a presentation (especially when it's projected from a laptop, allowing animation). Even Tufte himself used transparencies and videos when I saw his seminar.
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.
There is a php library called SparkLine that does only, you guessed it, spark lines.
The FAQ on the Sparkline site helps explain why use that library and not just a shrunken down graph or chart. Though I don't see a great need my self I'm sure there are others who may find it interesting.
J
TFGEditor, don't stop there, the suspence is killing me -- Please elaborate.
It's not nearly as bad as Jakob Neilsen's site.
I'm using a 1680x1050 monitor, and I personally have no problem with Tufte's website. If you've got a huge high-resolution monitor, you're pretty foolish to be browsing with your windows maximised. With the window open to about 2/3 the width of the screen, the content fits perfectly.
The absolute *worst* UI paradigm that has plagued the computing world for the past decade is the maximize button. Ever since multitasking was supported at the OS level, we've had the marvelous ability to work on more than one thing at a time. I don't spread every page of my newspaper out across the kitchen table when I read it. Why should I do the same for my web pages?
Apple was smart to have left it out of OS X, and Microsoft should have left it out of Win95, or killed it with XP. For the first week, it's annoying to drag the corners of the windows around, until you realize how much more productive you can be by having two pieces of work side-by-side. Heck, even for single-tasking, multiple windows are great. If I'm writing a research paper on Shakespeare, I can have a copy of Hamlet open right alongside the paper for quick reference and easy quotations.
Of course, those 14" 1600x1200 laptop screens *are* a problem, because they make text and images unbearably tiny. Apple's the first (mainstream) vendor to tackle this issue head-on, and the next version of OS X should be resolution-independent, which should open the door for smaller, higher-resolution screens that won't kill our eyesight.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I believe he is referencing Tufte's book "Visual Explanations", which gave case studies of the London Cholera epidemic and the Challenger explosion. In the case of hte former, innovative graphical displays led to the discovery of the source of the epidemic, thereby saving lives. In the case of the Challenger explosion, the engineers at the rocket manufacturer were unadept at compiling their data, and were unable to "sell" top NASA officials on canceling the launch.
Yes, it's called 'winning on merit'. He is respected because he is brilliant, articulate, and uncompromising, not because he got his books into Oprah's club.
Apple was smart to have left it out of OS X, and Microsoft should have left it out of Win95, or killed it with XP.
A lot of people use 1024x768 monitors and maximizing is darn useful, and many more were using them when XP came out.
For the first week, it's annoying to drag the corners of the windows around, until you realize how much more productive you can be by having two pieces of work side-by-side.
Which is annoying given the size of the average persons monitor.
Heck, even for single-tasking, multiple windows are great. If I'm writing a research paper on Shakespeare, I can have a copy of Hamlet open right alongside the paper for quick reference and easy quotations.
And that is why I use dual monitors, no need to deal with crap like aligning windows and so on. One click and it moves to the other monitor.
You have white space on the right if you use ANY resolution over 800x640, which is shitty design plain and simple.
I generally don't do PowerPoint. Once I did, though. My group was presenting a concept of operations for our software as applied to a new project. There were many sections to the presentation, and several of us were assigned portions of it relative to the parts of the system we were most familiar with. I did my section, which I thought was concise and informative, and sent it in to my manager to be placed in order with the rest. The plan was for each of us to actually talk to the section of the presentation he or she had worked on.
So here I am standing in front of a room full of my users, and my company's customers and subcontractors, only to discover at that moment that my manager had "adjusted" my slides by rearranging the points, rewording half of them, and introducing several inaccuracies along the way. I ended up saying what I was going to say anyhow, and the slides were no help to the audience at all. Except, of course, they all had a hardcopy in their hands, and that was their "notes" for the presentation unless they jotted something else down.
It ended up going well, and I received some compliments for the way I handled it (I was speaking from my own knowledge anyway and not from notes or the slides) but it was not my idea of a relaxing afternoon.
And the brethren went away edified.
As Ornaments... once the batteries die again.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Knuth did.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I would argue that the display of pure text is qute a different thing from things meant for the visual processing units of our brains, which he was very big on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While he was a little overzealous in going after Powerpoint and PC users, I think you are being over-sensitive. Generally I thought it a pretty good talk with some interesting information, and really misuse of Powerpoint deserves all the slamming he could give it.
You must not have sat through enough of the kinds of Powerpoint presentations Tufte was talking about or you'd appreciate his comments more.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I believe in this case he is trying to distinguish between displaying quantitative data in simple tables and displaying data in more graphical designs.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
You breathe the sacred names "Strunk" and "White"
in the same sentence as the flabby cliche
"rolling in their graves"?
Feh.
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
Tufte's latest book quotes British typographer Eric Gill: "If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself." ...that whenever you give a presentation, you're normally out there with an agenda. There are only a few presentations I've heard that I'd consider seeking "truth and goodness", and mostly it's from ideal organizations within a field (and I don't mean lobbying groups, even the non-profit mouthpieces). With a normal Powerpoint presentation, it's a lot harder to realize when you're getting three bulletpoints and some fluff versus three bullet points and meaningful information. I imagine it'd stand out quite a bit more in a presentation following Tufte's teachings.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't fold my newspaper in half so I can only read half the page at once, so why should I do the same for my web pages?
Not maximising means you're just left with blank space, wasting your monitor. If you have a 20" monitor and only have your window taking up 3/4 of it you may as well have a 15" monitor.
... everyone is familiar with baseball terminology from which you derived "BullPen".
And I thought of what you find in a pen recently occupied by a bull.
That may be the origin of the baseball term, too.
Well, if you mean for technical academic prose, here's a little gem from NASA (it's an oldie):
What if you happen to only be working on one thing at the time you want to read a webpage? Besides this misses the entire point of a markup language. A web page should always render to the size of the viewport the user has chosen. That was one of the original design goals.
***duck***
If you're looking for something that is more specific for creating better graphs and charts take a look at William Cleveland http://stat.bell-labs.com/wsc/ his work should be required reading for all college statistics majors.
The absolute *worst* UI paradigm that has plagued the computing world for the past decade is the maximize button.
Dissagree 100%. Not being able to maximize means having distracting clutter in the background, and increased opportunity to accedentally click on a back ground window and having it pop up in the middle of the page when you didn't want it, throwign you for a distraction when you are trying to get stuff done. Lack of maximize is one of my least favorite features in OS X.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
For a web page not properly designed into multiple columns, reading can get mighty difficult. I'm sure the number varies depending on the source, but 66 characters per line is optimal for legibility (depending on the subject matter 85-90 can be ok). Resizing that web page onto a 21" monitor and getting lines 150-200 characters long is annoying and can get difficult to read extended passages. The solution is to obviously design web page with multiple columns, *like your newspaper*, but then people will complain that half the screen is blank. Technically you could make your page 10 columns wide, but then we'd all be scrolling to the right, and like it or not, computer systems seem to favor scrolling in the vertical direction.
In case anyone was wondering, Tufte uses a Mac:s g?msg_id=0000Ej&topic_id=1
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-m
After spending a couple of years working as a graphic designer at a hospital, and being involved in the publication of a medical journal, I have some experience in data presentation and graphics, as well as working with meds/researchers preparing presentations. I find it interesting (but not surprising) in that I didn't see any comments here which mentioned the role of graphic designers in the presentation of data.
Sure, you might be a doctor or scientist or government bigshot, but someone who specialises in visual communication can probably do a much better job at visual communication that you can, and help you do your job better too. The scientific and medical fields are full of narrowly focused specialities - why not consult with a graphics specialist when you are working with graphics?
Many of the graphs and charts which were submitted to me at the hospital for presentations or to the medical journal from doctors and researchers were simply crap. Most submitters would be more than happy with revisions I suggested (I would typically re-do graphics from scratch), but the amount of time they wasted creating their first versions was astounding.
Some people would initially resist changes based solely on the fact that they had put so much time into their graphics. Quite frankly, an average person could (and would) easily spend many hours doing graphics work which I could do with greater clarity and higher quality in minutes. Looking at the lowest common denominator, considering what I am paid (even when working on a freelance basis) compared to what a typical physician earns, means the cost savings of not having doctors/researchers messing with powerpoint or other hack graphics programs are definitely worthwhile.
When physicians came to me while still in the preparatory stages of their work, results were better than most, without so much wasted time. Doing a job right the first time, instead of making a false start, going backwards and re-thinking and re-doing, is a better way to do things, no matter what field of work you are in.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
His books are painfull to read, and laid out very poorly.
They should be read, and they have excellent points and ideas, but they could be presented more succinctly.
I don't say this to indicate I know better then him, I say this as a reader of his books.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That should read: " our computers had the marvelous ability to work on more than one thing at a time." (even that isn't always true if you really want to nitpick). Computers multitask well; humans do not. Even if you think you are more productive when you multitask, you really aren't.
The point however isn't if it is better or not to maximize a window. The point is the web designer should never make that decision for the user. Properly written HTML is written to render efficiently on any user agent. You never know, your reader might be browsing the web on a mobile phone, text only browser or a braille interface. Bad use of markup languages only serves to reduce the number of people who can efficiently access the information you are publishing.
I ran across Edward Tufte via another webzine, it as excellent in its own way as slashdot proves itself to be /w GD would
daily.
For years as a network traffic analysis tools creator I had been depending on the coding by my collegues for
the visualization of the data I collected and transformed via various numerical methods. The results were almost
exclusively somehow disappointing, and thus not to put to fine a point on it a constant source of internal
tension as we pushed and pulled on each other over 'how to graph time series and event data'.
For me a deeper understanding was the result of the purchase of the first three books. As neither long nor
difficult reads I quickly finished the trio and was inspired to strike out on my own to see is Perl
be something I could accomplish. First and foremost using a concept of less is more quickly resulted in a
functional module from which I could experiment.
While I am far from 'priding myself' or suggesting I have produced a superior solution I have succeeded in
a Perl CGI (GD based) GUI which allows the analysts to dynamically select horizontal and vertical scaling,
n-scaling of the vertical (scaling) to allow very small and large values to be displayed w/o either
suppressing the other while allowing for the 'mid-section' its 'equal share' of the vertical space, with a
variety of numerical measuremenets (avg, median, trend (least square best fit line), min, max, (1st) std,
1st/3rd quartile, etc), presented as scatter, line, bar, and fill with active map regions allowing 'drilldown'.
While not for everyone the inspiration that I have recieved from Edward Tufte has provided me with the
motivation to investigate my understanding of his ideas using my data in a dynamic way that allows me to
adjust the visualization to the data. One key section for me was the discussion of the method used to represent
the effect of temperature on seals used on the space shuttle and how an altrnative visualization would have
clearly led to a more cautious conclusion that that which resulted in the Challenger disaster. That, as do
all of Edward Tufte's examples, has had a profound and lasting impression on me and my visualization coding.
I can therefore recommend Edward Tufte's books w/o reservation and sincerely hope that you will be inspired
as I have been.
Wii is actually the most stupid name because in North American English, it invokes the term 'wee-wee', which is a child's term for urination. It invokes an image among the primary targeted audience of childishness and toilet-training. Insanely bad marketing.
No one in their right mind would have named a game machine a wee-wee. But they did. Almost as bad of a name as the Commodore VIC-20 (in Germany).