Usually tables work better than sentences to convey quantitative data, especially when the analytical task is comparison. In this material from the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, however, the presentation method of listed paragraphs of text has great rhetorical power, partly because of the horrifying facts but also because of the presentation style of a deadpan march through the evidence.

Source: Supplement to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Women and Smoking: A Report of the Surgeon General. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (August 30, 2002), pp. 2-8.

Data in sentences - Women and Smoking

I'm interested to know how Mr. Tufte and readers of this Web site, as people who are interested in learning, education, and good information design, solve the problem of information overload.

These days, how do you decide, for example, what -- and how much -- to read and watch? And how do you divide that diet up in terms of professional development vs. personal interest? How do you decide what to subscribe to or what to read, watch, or listen to regularly?

How do you avoid becoming glued to your computer screen? What -- and how much -- do you read online vs. on paper? How do you decide how much time to spend reading, learning, or surfing the Web vs. being active and interacting with real people?

Thanks to all, and a note to Mr. Tufte: I attended your most recent seminar in Chicago and, as another colleague at the national YMCA office promised, it was life changing--a true delight.

I was wondering if you know of good designs that represent direction and magnitude of a continuously varying vector function in 3-dimensional space (imagine velocities of gas atoms or the strength of some field)?

Seth Powsner of the Yale Medical School and I wrote 2 articles on displaying data for monitoring medical patients several years ago. These articles are now posted in the NEW section.

The information architectures shown are designed to depict a complex multivariate flow of real-time data, provide some historical context, and indicate if any part of the process is in trouble. These architectures might be helpful for the display of quality control data, portfolio management, project monitoring, project management, as well as tracking the condition of medical patients.

he discussion of medical interfaces in my Visual Explanations (pages 110-111) is based on these articles.

Question

Do you think the days of the strict corporate design manual are numbered? I have designers around me who say 'oh no we can't do that it breaks the pre-ordained design parameters set i.e. grid width not specified, colour not specified, typeface not specified. My view is, if it does the job for which the change is intended - gets the company noticed and helps sell more products or services, stuff the parameters. We are not here to please our senses or look uniform but to do a good job.

Perhaps I'm the only one who thinks like this. Be interested in your views.

I'm preparing a series of plots for publication, but one of my primary intended readers happens to be color-blind. I like to use the printer's traditional red in addition to black as a second color, but I have never really found out if my reader can "see the difference" or not.

My question is: is there an accepted set of colors which combine sensitivity to this particular disability without sacrificing the maximum legibility and impact that one can achieve with the black/red(/third color?) combination?

I've been using Quark for about 2 years now and have been quite happy with everything I can directly control on my page layouts. It is especially good on the Apple Cinema monitor, which shows the full double-page layout along with the Quark tools. And Quark has been stable. The management of typography is not very graceful, however.

Recently several of the typographers and designers I know have mentioned Adobe's In Design.

It might be useful for people at this forum to hear about Quark and InDesign from experienced users of both. Or to have some links that provide thoughtful comparisons.

I'm wondering--do you see any relations between your work and that of the philosopher Nelson Goodman? It's been a while since I've read Goodman, but I kept expecting his name to turn up somewhere in Envisioning Information or Visual Explanations.

I am trying to track down online versions of maps drawn by Adolphe Quetelet and Andre Guerry in the 1830s in France. These maps were some of the earlier maps depicting crime and its relationship to geography. Do you know where I could find something like this?
Cynthia
University of Maryland