In the early 1900s, good typefaces were scarce, books poorly crafted and tasteless, type design a dead end, formal handwriting disconnected from origins of broad-edged pens and brushes, tools that shaped Roman letterforms for 2000 years.  Then four modern pioneers of design and typography created new modern typefaces, fresh interest in letterforms, beginnings of modernism. This book traces the far-reaching influence of these artists in Europe and the United States. This book provides discoveries and insights to the historical achievements in graphic design and typography.

Fermilab Art Gallery, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, April 12 - June 26, 2014.

20 page catalog for the Fermilab exhibit.

"ET's Feynman Diagrams are art, science, authenticity, precision, beauty, insight." - Chris Quigg, theoretical physicist at Fermilab, author of Gauge Theories of the Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic Interactions.

ET's stainless steel Feynman Diagrams are installed at the new World Trade Center building, Fermilabs, Hogpen Hill Farms, Cornell University, and in many private collections. ET's Feynman Diagrams have also been exhibited at Singapore's Art Science Museum, Cal Tech, and Michigan State University.

How to see and reason about optical experiences in 3-space and time: scale, form, color, airspace, landscape, and animals, shadows, dapples, reflections moving in space and time. How words control our optical experiences. 36 pages.

"Edward R. Tufte's book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy is, quite simply, excellent. The aims of the author in the writing of this book is '. . . to present fundamental material not found in statistics books, and in particular, to show techniques of quantitative analysis in action on problems of politics and policy.' To achieve this end, Tufte considers a narrow range of important topics in statistical analysis, primarily dealing with problems of prediction (including a good discussion of the concept of causation) and the relationships among variables through simple and multiple regression.

The bulk of the book concerns the use and interpretation of simple and multiple regression. Here, the discussion centers on issues that, as Tufte claims, do not usually find a place in standard statistics texts. For example, in simple regression, the book stresses the central role of residuals and residual analysis, and describes many of the measures familiar to social scientists as functions of the residuals, '... since reasonable measures of the quality of a line's fit to the data could hardly be anything but a function of the magnitudes of the errors.' Tufte puts residual plots to good use to gain understanding of a data set, and he shows how finding outliers gives the analyst hints about the inadequacy of a statistical model. This attitude is clearly passed along to the reader. The discussion of graphical techniques in general is quite good and includes the reproduction of graphs of several scatter plots.

Other topics in simple regression are also considered. A brief but compelling discussion of the `value of data as evidence,' with regard to the interpretation of nonrandom samples, is presented. An important discussion of the usefulness of computing slopes instead of correlation coefficients is given, complete with a good quote from John Tukey. Several examples requiring transformations of one or both variables to the logarithmic scale are given, along with an interpretation of transformed variables. The section on transformations is difficult for many students, but it contains information that is not usually available to the beginning nontechnical student.

For the last two years, I have used Data Analysis for Politics and Policy as a supplemental text in a demanding statistics service course for first year social science graduate students. The book has received almost uniform praise from the students."

Sanford Weisberg, "Review of Data Analysis for Politics and Policy," Journal of the American Statistical Association (September 1976), 768. 179 pages.

A COLLEAGUE of Galileo, Federico Cesi, wrote that Galileo's 38 hand-drawn images of sunspots “delight both by the wonder of the spectacle and the accuracy of expression.” That is beautiful evidence.

Evidence that bears on questions of any complexity typically involves multiple forms of discourse. Evidence is evidence, whether words, numbers, images, diagrams, still or moving. The intellectual tasks remain constant regardless of the mode of evidence: to understand and to reason about the materials at hand, and to appraise their quality, relevance, and integrity.

Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information. Beautiful Evidence is about how seeing turns into showing, how empirical observations turn into explanations and evidence presentations. The book identifies excellent and effective methods for preventing information, suggests new designs, and provides tools for assessing the credibility of evidence presentations.

The title has two origins. One is the quilts made by my mother, Sally James—Sarah Elizabeth Bartee James. She made quilts for six decades, collecting, cutting, and sewing together thousands of pieces to form beautiful, practical comforters when her children were growing up and, later, elaborate formal patterns that were works of art. Sometimes on one piece in the quilt, or on the lining, she would embroider a little design composed of her initials decorated with tiny flowers. The quilt was personal, and she was its author.

The title comes also from my work as a young reporter for four years on the city staff of The Omaha World-Herald. For my city editor, a "piece" was a bylined feature with participation and opinion by the writer rather than the attempt at impersonal reporting called for in regular news stories at that time. Several pieces in the present collection refer to newspaper features published with my byline: among the topics are my memories of a day with Eleanor Roosevelt in 1938, a week among movie stars in 1940, and a one-day stint in 1937 working as a maid after the county relief director threatened to stop payments to women who would not accept such jobs.

In Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte presents — and comments on — more than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sentences come from an extensive search to identify some of the ways professional writers use the generous resources of the English language.

The book displays the sentences in fourteen chapters, each one organized around a syntactic concept-short sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, appositives, parallelism, for example. It thus provides a systematic, comprehensive range of models for aspiring writers.

Artful Sentences grows out of one of Virginia Tufte's earlier books, Grammar as Style. Fresh examples from fiction and nonfiction bring new insights into the ways syntactic patterns work. Because the examples are such a pleasure, readers may be tempted to skip everything else, but the comments are inviting also, calling attention to techniques that are useful to writers of almost any type of fiction or nonfiction.

Both new and experienced writers will find inspiration: the book is not about "errors" but about successes. If you are already a good writer, Artful Sentences can help you to become excellent.

To write is to bring structure to ideas, information, feelings. Here are many creative strategies, in a unique book that is informed, affirming, lively, and of lasting value.

Virginia Tufte is distinguished emerita professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her special fields are Milton, Renaissance poetry, and the history and grammar of English.

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

32 page ebook, delivered as a PDF.

For more about PowerPoint, here's a sample from the essay: PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports

This inexpensive booklet reprints, in full color, chapter 2 of Visual Explanations, analyzing a cholera epidemic in London in 1854 and the evidence used to decide to launch the space shuttle Challenger. Topics include cause and effect, data errors and credibility, evidence selection, and statistical graphics. For teaching data analysis and evidence in decision-making.