Edward Tufte course review: “One visionary day” WIRED

August 10, 2016  |  staff
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Edward Tufte course review, WIRED

ONE VISIONARY DAY by Peter Myers

His insights lead to new levels of understanding both for creators and viewers of visual display.

Source: WIRED

Many are fluent in the language of technology. Few, however, speak as eloquently as Edward Tufte, whose theories of information design not only illuminate, they inspire. In a full-day seminar, Tufte, author of the classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, uses maps, graphs, charts, and tables to communicate what prose alone cannot. He is to information designers what The New Yorker once was to writers: a model of clarity and craftsmanship. His counsel ranges from the importance of attributing authorship to the responsible use of the 16 million colors at our disposal. “Above all,” he pleads, “do no harm.”

Tufte course Presenting Data and Information (now as an online video course Analyzing/Presenting   Data/Information)

I left the seminar with useful advice (“Force visual comparisons,” “Integrate all data”). Tufte bundles his critiques with proposed solutions that serve as models for our own designing. The real benefit of Tufte in person is witnessing his passion for ethics. To listen to him review how the Challenger disaster could have been averted, had well-intentioned engineers done a better job of presenting their case, is to hear a man who believes in the power of design.

Given that the heart of his enterprise is statistics (of which he’s a professor at Yale), one might worry about “lognormal distributions” and “trimetric projections.” This would be a mistake. Tufte keeps jargon to a minimum. His insights lead to new levels of understanding both for creators and viewers of visual display.

What makes Tufte most persuasive are his works themselves: His books and his seminar embody his belief that “good design is clear thinking made visible.”