You'll love the first Tufte book you read. If this is your second or third, you'll feel like he is repeating himself. ( )

Another very readable, visual, and to-be-absorbed book by Tufte on how to make effective visual displays of information. ( )

This is a much better book than the first one, there's a lot more substance and less polemic. However, it's not very well written and his main points get lost in the long series of examples, so it takes some work to get that substance out of it. ( )

I began reading Tuft's graphic information series in an attempt to thwart and destroy the boring academic PowerPoint. For those not aware, academic and/or scholarly PowerPoints, particularly those used to present research at conferences, are really, really, really...really...bad. Scholars are enamored with data and try to cram as much of it onto one slide as possible, literally presenting their audience with chapters of words on one slide (that no audience member can read and still reasonably listen to the presenter), APA-formatted tables (that no audience member can read because the data is too small), and lines of equations (that no audience member can decipher, but I'm certain the scholar believes looks impressive). Academic PowerPoints are distracting at their best, baffling at their worst. Tuft's series gives easy to understand textual and visual explanations on how to achieve good visual data. I do not believe it is necessary for academicians and scholars to become graphic artists; however, I believe it is necessary to learn how to display data in a manner that gets to the point of research and research outcomes with the impact intended.

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Books in the series:

Tufts, E. R. (1990). Envisioning information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Tufts, E. R. (1997). Visual explanations: Images and quantities, evidence and narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Tufts, E. R. (2001). The visual display of quantitative information (2nd Ed.). Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ( )

Super interesting info on data presentation written in an obtuse and boring way... ( )

-physically beautiful book
-gives me a standard for viewing graphics ( )

This is the third volume in a series by Edward Tufte (the others are "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information", and "Envisioning Information"). All three are beautifully crafted books that are a delight to read and to handle. The most recent one brings the reader's attention to the use of graphics, narrative, and numbers to convey motion, process, mechanism, cause and effect. In order to exemplify his thinking, Tufte uses a very wide range of subjects, from the explanation of magic tricks to the coloring of bathymetric maps. One chapter is devoted almost entirely to an argument that the Shuttle Challenger disaster could have been avoided, had the appropriate statistical data about the relationship between o-ring failures and temperature at launch been presented in a clearer fashion. Tufte's design of a computer kiosk for an art museum contains wisdom that should be useful to anyone constructing Web interfaces. ( )

Beautiful book, important message.

The three seminal books by Edward Tufte all address visual information presentation with a focus on accessibility and usefulness. The first addresses presentation of numeric data and different diagramming techniques. The second has a broader scope, including maps and other kinds of information, with a fine discussion of strategies for visual design. The third book is about visual representations of processes, causes and explanations. All three are unusually beautiful and well designed by the author, thus serving as good examples of their own topics.

As a non-mathematician with a serious problem with diagrams (like a lot of librarians, I connect much better with lists) this was going to be a challenge for me. But every page was a pleasure. Tuftes believes that complex information can be easily understood if presented in the right way. He applies the same principles to his writing which is clear without being dry. I'm still a long way from feeling comfortable creating anything more complex than a table, but I definitely feel I've made a start (and I'll eliminate those gridlines!). ( )

My fave of the 'original Tufte trilogy'. Awesome concepts around representing information in clear, truthful, and accurate ways. A lot of focus on map-based graphics, but concepts are applicable to other types as well. Sometimes a bit of high-and-mighty writing, but it's still eye-opening. ( )

This follows the pattern of the other three - beautiful production values, and an authoritative view (some might say didactic!) of design as applied to the graphical display of information. The book was originally published in 1990; the copy I have is the 10th printing from 2005.

The book has six chapters: Escaping Flatland, Micro/Macro Readings, Layering and Separation, Small Multiples, Color and Information, Narratives of Space and Time, and finally a brief Epilogue.

The first chapter (Escaping Flatland) explores the representation of our three dimensional world in the two dimensions of the printed page. From minor examples (such as the moulted toad skin as a two dimensional representation of the three dimensional toad!), he proceeds to the major examples of Galileo's description of sunspot activity - this leads through to 20th century compilations of sunspot data in more abstract form. Other examples of displaying spatial information on the printed page include the diagrammatic notation of dance movements. Perhaps I am a bit dense, but where I found the sunspot diagrams easy to understand, dance notation was too complex. Via some lovely city maps drawn as three dimensional illustrations of cityscapes, this material seques neatly into the second chapter, which concerns to assembly of smaller details to a larger whole (Micro/macro readings). Standout examples include a discussion of the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington,DC. ( )

A must-read for anyone in the field of information design, not to mention a refreshing counterpoint to the PowerPoint credo of our day. Envisioning Information is a visually sumptuous book with page after page of remarkable examples through history of multi-dimensional data adroitly transcribed to the 2D surface (a.k.a. flatland). ( )

Splendid spectrum of examples for visual display ( )

Beautiful book, important message.

This seems a further evolution or departure from his early works. Perhaps necessarily so. Unlike his seminal work being philosophical and symbolic; this one is instructional and didactic. The book has a ton of eye candy that is while not amazing is certainly striking and memorable. The book is cleverly split into only six main segments/themes. Within each there's about 2-3 points, so laconic overall. However each of the points/truths is non intuitive and valuable. All the pics/charts/visuals go to back these up. ( )

A seminal work. ( )

126 p.

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