Seven Things You Need to Know About Edward Tufte: For all lovers of beauty

Creativity | July 14th, 2008 by Danielle LaPorte

We sing the praises of Edward Tufte. We bow to his reverence of beauty + logic. Nearly every page of his every book makes us go “ahhh.” If you’re a designphile, we know you kneel to the man. If his work is new to you and you care about excellent visual communication, craftsmanship, sensory poetics, well then, you simply must do your homework on the altar of Information Visualization.

Seven Things You Need To Know About Edward Tufte

Edward Tufte staunchly believes that PowerPoint is evil. Evil.

Amazon.com calls Edward R. Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information one of the “Best 100 books of the 20th century.” Scientific American calls it, “A work of art.”
According to Tufte (deemed the “The Galileo of Data,”) probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn is Napolean’s March To Moscow, by Charles Joseph Minard. You will never look at a sorry excel sheet or pie chart the same way again!

Speaking of Galileo, Edward Tufte owns a first print edition of one of his books, published in the early 1600’s. If you’re fortunate enough to take a workshop with Tufte (they typically sell out well in advance,) he may just have his Galileo book passed ’round by a white-gloved assistant. It is a thing of great beauty to behold.
The night before the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster was due to take it’s fatal flight, a group of scientists tried to convinced NASA leadership to call off the expedition. They surmised that a slight change in weather temperatures was going to cause too much physical resistance in a part of the ship’s components. Because their written information was presented it such an ineffective format, it was not clear just how right their assessment was. In his book, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, Tufte argues that a simple re-work of their data presentation could have convinced officials to call off the tragic flight.
Ironically, Tufte’s forum on his website is a sorry state of inattentive organization, but the content is, as usual, smart, smart, smart.
Edward Tufte is a man after our own hearts: “If your words aren’t truthful, the finest optically letter-spaced typography won’t help,” he says. “And if your images aren’t on point, making them dance in color in three dimensions won’t help.” Yep. Authenticity wins every time.