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Edward Tufte Talks information Design
Posted by
samzenpus
on Mon Aug 21, 2006 07:09 PM
from the good-design dept.
from the good-design dept.
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."
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Read his books! (Score:5, Interesting)
His books are required reading in our lab and I encourage everyone who is involved in presentation of data of any kind to spend some time with his books.
Re:Read his books! (Score:5, Informative)
Strunk & White, "Elements of Style".
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Re:Hmm.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Powerpoint used well (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Hmm.... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Outspoken Powerpoint Critic? (Score:3, Insightful)
I did about 5 months of powerpoint stuff in the army (after which i was released for mental health reasons.. =\), and from my experience powerpoint has no use other than make managers and commanders feel important.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Compaired to Word, power point is a feast for the eyes!
Re:Outspoken Powerpoint Critic? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a side bonus, you'll get eye contact from your audience rather than the disconcerting experience of looking out at a sea of faces who are all looking slightly to one side, peering at:
- Standard Tufte line
* high-data essential
- Good to have eye contact
But on the whole I agree that PowerPoint isn't inherently evil if used as a way of doing a nice slide-show of reasonably detailed elements (graphs, pictures, movies). The only problem is that the resolution of projectors is still pretty wretched compared to printed graphs.
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Re:Outspoken Powerpoint Critic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not everyone pays attention to the speaker all the time, never missing a single word or meaning.
Also, pretty pictures keep people from deciding their text messages are worth more attention than your presentation or so a professor of mine says.
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Re:Outspoken Powerpoint Critic? (Score:4, Interesting)
1) No matter what my company says, they get a white background presentation with a small logo in the bottom left corner of each slide. I refuse to use background templates of "company colors" 2) No crap on the borders. I can't stand the waste of space that borders use up. I would rather make my table 20% bigger than have a pretty pattern of lines off-setting the slide 3) Text titles no bigger than 36 font, text subject matter no smaller than 24 font 4) Preferably 1, if I must then 2 plots to a slide 5) No test describing the plots on the slide, I should be doing that 6) No bar charts! I hate bar charts 7) Bold primary colors, none of this 'earth shades' 8) Plots imported from a graphing package. I use Sigmaplot of Origin. Excel is the armpit of graphing.
Bottomline is that if you have to use sounds and animations to capture the audiences attention, you're not doing a good job as a presenter, or the audience is just plain not interested in your subject (which happens).
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Re:Outspoken Powerpoint Critic? (Score:4, Funny)
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more useful than the article (Score:5, Informative)
Gettysburg address in powerpoint (Score:5, Funny)
Manager leaves suicide note in powerpoint (Score:4, Funny)
Don't forget this classic [theonion.com] from The Onion.
GMD
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From who's perspective? (Score:5, Insightful)
- Don't have anything to say and or
- Whose words aren't truthful
For these people in either or both the above categories, PowerPoint can be a huge g-dsend, allowing them to execute a praise-generating (or, sales-generating) presentation that, had the person followed Tufte's advice, would have (rightfully) bombed.PowerPoint: stretching Truth and Content since 1997.
People ready software, indeed. Lots of people have nothing to say or lie when they say it.
Example: the Vista project manager giving a status report on features implemented, bugs solved and milestones met (this needs "filler") and projections for hitting delivery dates (this needs "less than truthful"). PowerPoint to the rescue!
Seriously, though. In Tufte's world, those without something truthful to say simply would say nothing. I like that world. But, I live in the Internet Age and know that world, perfect as it is, does not exist.
Wikipedians (Score:5, Interesting)
Every page element should signify some meaning; a heading should be underlined to distinguish it, but only if it is not otherwise distinguished by font size, vertical whitespace or some other typesetting. One element variation should suffice, as long as it's a bold change. A table should have borders only if the data are unclear otherwise. It's sad that as useful as Wikipedia can be, it still suffers from so many flaws [slashdot.org]. Wikipedians could learn much from Tufte, or from any study of technical communication.
Bad Design (Score:4, Insightful)
But TWike like OggVorbis, is a ridiculous name that actually hurts the program by alienating people from exploring what it does after they see or hear the Program name referred to in some random context. Giving programs stupid names is a deep disfunction of the Linux/Open Source community. Seriously, we need to get over this.
Re:Bad Design (Score:5, Funny)
Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning 'fast' or 'quick', so it does at least partly describe the function of the software. You might complain that not everyone is familiar with Hawaaian words, but then not everyone is familiar with baseball terminology from which you derived "BullPen". Open source software tends to have a very cross-cultural, cross-language audience. Do you suggest that projects rename themselves for each language they target? Projects are named for marketing purposes, to be memorable and appealing. It sounds very much like you just hate the idea of marketing, so I will rename you CrankyBastard, which I think we can all agree is memorable, appealing and accurately describes you!
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Re:Bad Design (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Tuffte talkes about this very phenomina using terms familiar to anyone in design: affordances. Affordances are learned aspects of a particular domain. Affordances, as Tufte has touched upon in his design for information clairty are to be used, not avoided. Everyone had to learn what MP3 meant. Everyone had to learn how to read a chart (or, if they weren't a jock on a fast road to CEO at Daddy's firm, fail High School geometry.)
For example, I am a big fan of functional naming. Instead of a variable named $CORNED_BEEF I would use $HASH_PIVOT. However, if you are an ESL like 95% of the world, it won't matter what you call your variables becuase the non-native aspect will always stand in the way. You will have to learn what those identifiers mean and then remember that.
The same holds for software. The 'lingua franca' of Computer Science, hence much programming and software marketing, is English. The language of musical notation is Italian. From study I know what agitato and determinato are. But it does not help me that they are Italian for agitated and determined, respectfully, because I had to learn their definitions in English. If I spoke Italian I could have pulled the names for those musical styles out of thin air just listening to music. However, they are just words attached to those concepts for me, abstract labels and nothing more. However, I do not see any difference between this hundreds of year old phenomina and sotware naming.
But TWike like OggVorbis, is a ridiculous name that actually hurts the program by alienating people from exploring what it does after they see or hear the Program name referred to in some random context.
I don't think we'd get a lot of benefit if TWiki had been called VersionGroupwareType003.
People hunting online for MP3s might dissagree. After all, MP3 just says 'music file' doesn't it? MP3 is a Motion-Picture Experts Group layer 3 file. Yes, I looked that up. I might think that has something to do with the movies, but music? Wiki means HTML TEXTAREA editor with special markup for you web browser. (Really the groupware aspect of Wikis is kinda of a dominating secondary effect.) Ogg Vorbis stands for Vorbis encoded audio inside an Ogg format container.
This is far from the point thougt. Tufte's expertise is to spot on eliminate distracting garbage in a design. Powerpoint is very good at packing in garbage, hence his critisim of it. Simple, silly names are appripirate when differentiating. When they are clutter, like bullets points that take up 40% of the slide, names won't serve this purpose. For evern search.com there is a competitor not wanting to lose mindshare (or trademark infringement lawsuits) by having a very similar name. But pardon me, I have more google'ing to do before I can flesh out that point.
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A pressing need: Tufte-style interface library? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I really would like to see is a new widget set (with lots of data presentation support - obviously most of the widgets should be quantitative displays) and a style written in some already well-supported widget set (Qt, Swing,
This makes it a lot harder for schlubs like me who don't really have skills in this area, and don't have time to develop them. Further, it makes it more or less impossible to achieve these sort of fine effects programmatically - I'd like to see interactive displays that are informed by his sort of design sense, not just nice presentations (using hand-outs, of course
If anyone is interested in this - or knows of systems that go any decent way in this direction - please post or e-mail me at:
geoff AT cs DOT usyd DOOOOT edu DoT au
(sorry about the stylized "dot" silliness, but something tells me that the traditional foo AT bar DOT com is probably already being mined by spammers - or will be soon).
Re:A pressing need: Tufte-style interface library? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now for a crass generalization: techies always think that a problem can be solved with software and/or obsession. But sometimes, it takes actual skill to do good work. After all, programmers rarely hesitate to get pissy with some noob who works in Visual Basic, but they somehow think that art and design are skills that can be picked up from a book.
If it's really important to you to have attractive visuals, then don't be an arrogant asshole, and hire someone to do the work. It doesn't have to be expensive (go to any art school, and you'll find dozens of young, eager artists and graphic designers looking for a break, and willing to work for reasonable rates), and it will go a long way to making you look more professional and polished.
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Re:A pressing need: Tufte-style interface library? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, there are so many cases where there are existing cliches that could be improved. For example, Tufte has a brilliant redesign of a scatterplot that uses pretty much every bit of ink on the screen to convey useful data (for example, the X and Y axes become range bars that show the univariate distribution of data). This could be hacked once and for all into a TufteScatterplot widget. And so on.
One of the major problems with the 'hire a graphic artist' approach is that frequently, we're dealing with systems that will display unanticipated data. I'm working with a statistical problem at the moment (and building some generalized tools to deal with it) and I have no way of knowing ahead of time whether someone is going to work with a model with 60 factors of which 5 are significant or 10 factors of which 7 are significant. I don't know what sort of names the person will give the factors. I don't know whether the significant factors will be all pretty much the same size (e.g. 1.5%, 2.2%, -1.3%) or hugely different (200%, -50%, 10%). When presenting 'significance' in a system, I can't have the system automatically call the nearest design school to handcraft a nice display. Thus, a system that makes a programmatic attempt at trying to achieve ideals of good design is much better than a system that doesn't even bother.
Of course, anyone will be able to cobble together a rotten-looking, dishonest and confusing interface out of these kind of components. So what?
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He puts his money where his mouth is. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/s15427625tcq1304
The interviewer asked him about why he self-published:
"After moving to Yale University, I finished the manuscript in
1982. A publisher was interested but planned to print only 2,000
copies and to charge a very high price, contrary to my hopes for
a wide readership. I also sought to design the book so as to make
it self-exemplifying--that is, the physical object itself would
reflect the intellectual principles advanced in the book. Publishers
seemed appalled at the prospect that an author might
govern design."
So, here's a guy writing a book on how to present information and the publisher thinks he knows better. LOL. Naturally, Tufte chose to keep control of the process. In other words, we are to do as he does. (as opposed to do as he says.) This approach reminds me of a lecture our principal used to give. The lecture was on how to lecture. He gave seven different techniques. He delivered each technique by using that technique. This is what Tufte refers to as self-exemplifying. Our library doesn't know it yet but they are buying copies of his books.
Re:The Leonardo da Vinci of Data? (Score:5, Funny)
And I am the Jackson Pollack of data! They don't let me near the spreadsheets much anymore though....
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Re:HTML Design? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm using a 1680x1050 monitor, and I personally have no problem with Tufte's website. If you've got a huge high-resolution monitor, you're pretty foolish to be browsing with your windows maximised. With the window open to about 2/3 the width of the screen, the content fits perfectly.
The absolute *worst* UI paradigm that has plagued the computing world for the past decade is the maximize button. Ever since multitasking was supported at the OS level, we've had the marvelous ability to work on more than one thing at a time. I don't spread every page of my newspaper out across the kitchen table when I read it. Why should I do the same for my web pages?
Apple was smart to have left it out of OS X, and Microsoft should have left it out of Win95, or killed it with XP. For the first week, it's annoying to drag the corners of the windows around, until you realize how much more productive you can be by having two pieces of work side-by-side. Heck, even for single-tasking, multiple windows are great. If I'm writing a research paper on Shakespeare, I can have a copy of Hamlet open right alongside the paper for quick reference and easy quotations.
Of course, those 14" 1600x1200 laptop screens *are* a problem, because they make text and images unbearably tiny. Apple's the first (mainstream) vendor to tackle this issue head-on, and the next version of OS X should be resolution-independent [tuaw.com], which should open the door for smaller, higher-resolution screens that won't kill our eyesight.
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