What Excellence Looks Like
Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte (Graphics Press, 1990)
It’s just about impossible to imagine more astonishing examples of excellence in technical communication than the ones brilliantly collected, reproduced, and interpreted in Envisioning Information.
This is an amazing book. It has been acclaimed by many experts as the best book ever written on information graphics. it is also recognized as a gorgeous specimen of book design by everyone who thumbs through its pages.
Tufte has taught social and political science at Princeton, and currently teaches graphic design, statistics, and political economics at Yale. The subject of Envisioning is the portrayal, in the two-dimensional ‘flatland’ of paper, of ‘the rich visual world of experience and measurement.’ Tufte has said that his task in writing, designing, and publishing the book was “to show the best damn things I can.” It is indeed full of wonderful things: examples from seventeen countries, seven centuries, three planets and one star.
Envisioning has been widely reviewed, and will be a classic in the field probably the classic for many years.
Less widely known is Tufte’s earlier The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Graphics Press, 1983). This, too, is a work of genius, though it was more austerely produced. The author published both books himself, plowing the profits from the first into such indulgences as using 23 different color printing plates on a single page in the second.
This column will have more to say about Tufte’s work another time. For now, please accept these nuggets, panned from a published interview with the author (Aldus Magazine, May/June 1991):
On how he goes about designing an information graphic: “I go through and think, ‘Has somebody done this right already?’ If so, fine; I’ll do it that way. The second thing I try to ask is, ‘What do the insiders do? What are the internal designs used by people who are experts in the field?’ …A third strategy is for me to do a great many drafts. It’s just like writing. I write 20 or 30 drafts of everything I do.”
On the role of typography in information design: “For 500 years, very smart and talented people have been thinking about type, and we should therefore take the lessons of classical typography . . .. Good type is a solved problem. You just look at well-designed books.”
General advice to information designers: “Read Strunk and White. Read Tufte. Look at good sentences, look at good illustrations.”