Edward Tufte Talks information Design

BoredStiff writes "The Weekend Edition of NPR ran a story on Edward Tufte — the outspoken critic of PowerPoint presentations — he has been described by The New York Times as "The Leonardo da Vinci of Data." Since 1993, thousands have attended his day-long seminars on Information Design. Tufte's most recent book is filled with hundreds of illustrations that demonstrate one concept: good design is timeless, while bad design can be a matter of life and death."

more useful than the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Edward Tufte's site [edwardtufte.com].

Edward Tufte was on NPR

[memoid]

There was a radio story on NPR [npr.org] about Edward Tufte over the weekend, if you haven't listened to it yet.

Re:Bad Design

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad design number two is having a dandy enough site for the software, but giving no clue as to *what it actually does*.

When I am overlord it will be mandatory to have the first question in a FAQ be "What is it and what does it do?".

I don't want to have to wade through low-level descriptions of the API just to work out that it doesn't do what I want it to do.

Re:Read his books!

[Nefarious Wheel]

Is there a Tufte equivalent for academic prose?

Strunk & White, "Elements of Style".

Re:Hmm....

[Otter]

Tufte's reputation is usually boiled down here to "the world's foremost critic of PowerPoint" but that's hardly what he's about. He's a wizard at explaining how to present data more effectively, not just an unusually articulate "M$ teh sux!!!" nitwit.

Re:Hmm....

[BWJones]

Yes, I *am* saying that I used a presentation software package, yet in using that package, I kept the "chartjunk" to a minimum, used graphics effectively where appropriate and used simple data and clear presentation to deliver the message.

This can be done with Powerpoint, Keynote and a variety of other packages. However, the problem with them is that people often use things like 3D graphs where inappropriate, fill up screens with lots of little text whereupon they say "don't read this, I just wanted to show......". Also the distracting use of transitions that flip and pop and such and cute little sounds that do nothing for the message except cloud it are common things that folks like Tufte and interestingly enough David Byrne have also commented on.

There is one library: Sparklines

[jmarkantes]

There is a php library called SparkLine [sparkline.org] that does only, you guessed it, spark lines [wikipedia.org].

The FAQ on the Sparkline site helps explain why use that library and not just a shrunken down graph or chart. Though I don't see a great need my self I'm sure there are others who may find it interesting.

J

Clarity in Technical Reporting

[Phatmanotoo]

Is there a Tufte equivalent for academic prose?

Well, if you mean for technical academic prose, here's a little gem from NASA (it's an oldie):

Clarity in Technical Reporting [nasa.gov]
by Katzoff, S., NASA.

Re:A pressing need: Tufte-style interface library?

[trbdef]

While still not on par with Tufte's graphic quality, there are quite a few packages that attempt to produce new displays with high information density for a variety of contexts. See for instance Discovery [ilog.com] and some other tools of the same kind: KDNuggets [kdnuggets.com]