Comment Re:There is one library: Sparklines (Score 1) 193
I'm really disappointed with Tufte's execution of sparklines, frankly. In Beautiful Evidence he advocates for them heavily, but even in the print book (which is otherwise gorgeously typeset) they look a bit clunky. They are, if anything, violations of his own principles of information clarity, since none of his sparklines include a scale or any other way to correctly read the data.
I went to see him speak recently, and a huge part of his argument for sparklines was that the human eye is capable of distinguishing subtle, tiny differences in shape, so there's no harm in slipping tiny graphs into paragraphs. To prove this point, he relies on images of the letter A in different serif faces -- at about 150pt, where the differences are quite obvious. Sure, someone can see differences in shapes that are two inches tall... but I'd wager that nearly all non-typographers will have to strain to see the difference between two book faces at the same letter size in the same paragraph, and poorly executed sparklines will just be a blur. They lack density, for a Tufte creation, and they're more clutter than explanation.
I went to see him speak recently, and a huge part of his argument for sparklines was that the human eye is capable of distinguishing subtle, tiny differences in shape, so there's no harm in slipping tiny graphs into paragraphs. To prove this point, he relies on images of the letter A in different serif faces -- at about 150pt, where the differences are quite obvious. Sure, someone can see differences in shapes that are two inches tall... but I'd wager that nearly all non-typographers will have to strain to see the difference between two book faces at the same letter size in the same paragraph, and poorly executed sparklines will just be a blur. They lack density, for a Tufte creation, and they're more clutter than explanation.
