I attended your course this very day and was astonished. You are the clearest, finest, and most logical--thus most perfect--teacher that I have ever seen--and I have had many, many classes with very, very excellent teachers. I do not cavil, I am not captious; but I note that on page 111 of Visual Explanations that the value printed in red for "Reg Insulin", which I interpret to signify the most recent value injected that day, is in error. It should read "0" if insulin therapy was discontinued.

3 units of insulin administered to a euglycemic patient would cause certain, horrific & a sadly theatrical death.

What gives?
Mike

I just attended your lecture in San Francisco. I wanted to ask this, was the illustration of Saturn that was embedded in the text created as a piece of type or a woodblock? Were the embedded images in the book printed with the text or separately?

I am curious to know the Lie Factor for the drawings on pages 48-49 in Envisioning Information ie some of the space junk is about 50 times as big as the smallest islands in the West Indies! And I know there is a disclaimer about the scale of the drawings at the bottom right of page 49.

My question is whether in this instance it was a good idea to include these drawings to support what I consider are obviously strong personal views - the accompanying text contains many emotive words eg "the trashing of space", "phenomenal", "disheartening...images" - when the factual text description of how much space junk there is actually speaks for itself. Because if I can see the Lie Factor is huge then a proponent of future testing of space weapons, or someone who wants to put more junk up into space, surely will and then they could use it to discredit opposing arguments. (BTW I wholeheartedly believe that we should pick up all our trash when we leave a place.)

Have you underestimated the intelligence of the readers? Or was it considered worth doing so in order to get this issue in front of as many (educated and perhaps influential) people as possible?

Yours sincerely,

Jim Moore

PS I love these books!

Dear Mr. Tufte:

As a child I voraciously played with Legos and drew maps, diagrams, charts, etc. of imaginary places, things, organizations, etc. I also had (and still do) have a passion for commercial aviation, which has led me to where I am today as an airport planning consultant. I currently hold a Bachelor's of Science in Civil Engineering, with some graduate studies in air transport systems.

However, I've realized, with a couple of years of work experience under my belt, that I'm really more interested in information design, graphic design, cartography, cognitive art, environmental graphics, etc. Reading about prominent information designers like Paul Mijksenaar (who designed the new signage for New York area airports) has made me re-think about what I want to do. Do you have any advice for a full-time non-design professional like me on what I can do to change my career towards information design? Thank you very much in advance.

Sincerely,

Mihir Shah

I am very interested in finding a copy suitable for framing of Babar's Dream by Jean de Brunhoff on pages 128-129 of Visual Explanations. Can you direct me to a source for a print I have not been able to locate one. EB

I am unclear about exactly what edge fluting is as referenced on page 92 of Envisioning Information. I have done a dictionary look up and Internet search. I see lots of references to architecture, etc. I understand that it has to do with contextual effects, but feel like I am missing something.

What do you consider in choosing a baseline figure for the vertical amount scale of a graph? In The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (second edition), pages 68 and 74-75, I noticed that you chose nonzero baselines.

The side note on page 89 of "Envisioning Information" mentions a book called "Visual Design of the User Interface" published in 1989 written by yourself. I am having a difficult time locating this book from Barnes and Noble or other such book dealers. How can I obtain a copy? Is it still being published?

Thank you,
Beth

dear reader/ET: I am a humanities librarian on sabbatical who is researching innovative ways for classifying or organizing scholarly resources for a humanities portal. The process involves catloging sites that have been evaluated as appropriate or authoritative for upper level research....fulltext primary and secondary, converged data. Could someone direct my thinking or reading in this area, please. My sense is that a new form of cataloging or classifying might be accomplished through a three-demensional figure that would allow the researcher to describe the research need. Any thoughts appreciated.

rosemary aud-franklin
humanities librarian university of cincinnati
on sabbatical at oxford university's
humanities computing unit project humbul

Complete control of schedule and quality are certainly benefits of publishing your own work, but publication costs and aquisitition of necessary industry knowledge seem to pose significant obstacles.

As a designer wishing to publish some graphically based works in the near future, what decisions or market conditions directed you towards this choice?

In addition, what portions of the publishing process do you feel content in handing off to subcontractors, and what mistakes have you made that helped direct and refine your later publsihed work? Have you, or have you considered, publishing work from ouside sources?

Thanks, I enjoy and appreciate your research.

David Bales