Envisioning Information

This is my 3rd favorite of Tufte's books after Visual Display and Visual Explanations, but it would be a good addition for any Tufte collection and still contains useful info.

I admit. I do not have natural tendencies for developing web sites, color maps, charts, schedules, power points, diagrams or GUIs. Anything as such comes out in complete discord until I came across Edward Tufte's name in a seminar brochure.

Edward Tufte scrutinizes design strategies all they way back in time from the Renaissance period into the 20th century. Initially I wondered, how on earth are these prestigious techniques presented in ancient times similarly applied today? They are not common today. Computer programs and marketing propaganda have limited our visual expectations to only broad and small pieces of information, limiting our learning space about the world we live in. Beyond contemporary appeals, Edward sheds out underlying utility out of these relics into everyday use. His prime example is a 1735 London figure of two dancers. The drawing describes their dance in time, motion, and sound without common resort to animation.

Chapters in this book: Escaping Flatland, Micro/Macro Readings, Layering and Separation, Small Multiples, Color and Information, and Narratives of Space and Time.

This book is about telling a story. Tufte has selected a collection of the most beautiful charts. He then presents each chart design and argues the qualities and defects in each and how sometimes small differences can be used to distort the numbers. If you were to buy a single Tufte book then I'd recommend his other book "Visual Display of Quantitative Information". But if you have a few bucks to spare then this is certainly a nice plus.

This is the second book in Ed Tufte's trilogy on graphical displays. It is a sequel to "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". In this book Tufte shows how color, multiple pictures from different perspectives, graphs, charts and even newspaper text can be used to convey on a flat piece of paper information for high-dimesional data.

Most important is the ability of two-dimensional pictures to display the information of the three dimensional world that the human mind can comprehend through sight. This is the reason for the title to the first chapter "Escaping Flatland".

However, as interesting as the pictures are themselves it is necessary to read the text and look back and forth between pictures to fully appreciate the points of the text. As with his earlier work, Tufte demonstrates the principles of good graphics through effective demonstration of ideas conveyed by good and bad examples. The difference is a broader coverage of techniques and greater emphasis on the good examples.

This book is a nice lead in for the third book, "Visual Explanations", which deals with examples where Tufte believes the graphical displays actually lead to good inferences about a problem under study.

As a student of Information Science and an admitted non-designer I decided to study "Envisioning Information" after looking at Mr. Tufte's biography and well-crafted website. I was hoping to gain some insight on the rules of design especially when it came to presenting information clearly in an aesthetically-pleasing way, in teaching me these skills Tufte's book does an admirable job.

From the beginning I was drawn in by the quality of the book itself; flipping through it for a quick skim, one cannot be left unimpressed by the vivid graphics, which serve as examples for the text; it is easy to stop, read-a-little and move on. Another integral part of the presentation is the layout of the pages; the eye is able to capture the main text, the annotations, and give the examples the attention the deserve without feeling a certain pressure to continue. This is in opposition to most instructional books, in which side-bars and special sections pull my eyes away from the main text, serving as distractions rather than additions. Tufte's design makes sure everything on the page is related - meaning the text relates to the image, relates to the annotation. Plus, the main text is set in Bembo, which is a nice loose font; easy to read closely, as well as skim quickly.

"Envisioning Information" is broken up into five main chapters (not counting the Introduction and short Epilogue), each chapter has a main idea that is elucidated primarily by the examples Tufte presents. A criticism of the book is its relative lack of conceptual density (aside from the chapter 'Color and Information,' which, for me, required several close readings) - Tufte has his main ideas and briefly clarifies them, but does not go much beyond that, in fact, much of the text is used to describe the examples which [the description] is only pertinent to the concepts in a passing way. The reliance on visual examples can give the reader more an experience of viewing a slideshow than reading a text. It is these images that have the most potential to teach the reader; while the text can reasonably be understood with a quick reading, a close examination of the visuals is required to truly benefit from "Envisioning Information."

Repetition (Tufte does not shy away from repeating his concepts when examples illustrate similar ideas as previously discussed) and conceptual density issues aside, I found "Envisioning Information" to be what I was looking for. The positive impression this book left on me is not solely because it taught me useful design/presentation ideas as I went through it, but because I know I will be able to enjoy it at length upon future forays into the subject.

All of the above is simply to say, in long-form: it is recommended.