

The Financial Times on Edward Tufte - DanielRibeiro
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/dda1cb5c-f4c0-11e2-a62e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2aBj9w7FJ

======
phy6
I attended one of his day long seminars recently, and I was displeased with
the lack of breadth and depth. Sure, he rails against PowerPoints like no
other, we get that. My biggest issue is that everything he presented was from
someone else-- he's literally just aggregating other people's work and
postulating on them with fuzzy emotional thoughts-- and barely anything
applies to dynamic, user driven displays such as you would find on a web
dashboard.

How to save yourself $300 hundred dollars AKA My half page of notes from the
seminar:

0) Get the books on eBay or Amazon if you _really_ want them.

1) Don't use PowerPoint. Try to convince your viewers to browse a web page as
the presentation, after you've convinced your IT staff to set up a web server
for your presentation.

2) Look at ESPN.com, Weather.gov and Google News and Google Maps if you want
to see what he thinks are the pinnacle of data presentations on the web. This
will save you a few hours.

3) "Use verbs not Nouns" Show comparisons and mechanisms.

4) "Do whatever it takes to express the information"

5) "Show interaction between objects"

6) "Don't use boxes or drop shadows". Avoid "Chart Junk"

7) "Use small multiples" (he peddled his spark lines and ESPN's groups of
stats)

8) Make paper based, text presentations and supply that to people as the
arrive at the meeting. This way they can read that before jumping in with
questions. The paper allows them to skip ahead and read what they want to know
about so they don't interrupt you.

9) Calm the f2ck down when you go to meetings. He spent about an hour giving a
lame rendition of How to Win Friends and Influence People. In one sentence: Be
nice, be patient, be persuasive.

10) Ask yourself:

==1) "What's the problem?"

==2) "Why does it matter?"

==3) "What are you going to do about it?"

Other issues I had with his seminar:

1) I disliked the way he was surrounded by his thug ushers, who seemed to comb
the aisles looking for someone or some thing. It made me feel like I was at a
cult meeting or that they were worried about someone recording the seminar.

2) I disliked his peddling of his mother's book and his sculptures.

3) His dour emotional expressions about not wanting to teach government how to
visualize things (This meeting was in Arlington VA, so I'm sure there were
lots of military folks/contractors) in wake of the leaks. That's fine but now
you look like a sellout, 'teaching' them anyway.

4) The multiple videos presentations about visualizing musical data. That's
cute, but the guy is off his rocker if he thinks people are going to use that
in place of a traditional presentation.

5) The repeated videos. I think we watched the same video three times of a
Swiss topological map with an ethnic female voice narrating. By the second
time I was already thinking to myself 'I wish he would stop wasting my time
with that'.

6) I understand there is a cult of personality around him, and I generally
thought highly of his name until I went to the seminar. A coworker who went a
few months before me told me it wasn't worth the time, but it was the cult of
personality that caused me to go. He ended up pretty much being a douche in
person. Not one visualization we saw was created by him, he is literally
curating other's great works, and for that, you can pick up used books on your
own or visit a library.

7) All in all it felt way too touchy-feely and not very concrete. He only
_briefly_ made mention of R and D3, saying they were high end, advanced
visualization tools, that we as an audience shouldn't be using, because they
are too complex. WTF.

8) Things that are NOT covered: a) Moving data, aside from his video
visualization of music that he found somewhere. b) Visualizaing dynamic graphs
or Sankeys. c) Interactive displays, such as on a website for users to use.
The closest he came was to extol the virtues of ESPN. He literally recommended
to bring up your presentations to the level of ESPN.com, and you'd meet with
success.

TLDR; To each his own, but I wish I had my day back.

~~~
nilkn
His books are great, mainly as a collection of interesting examples, but I
agree with you on his seminar. I was let down. Nothing that I would really
complain about since I didn't have to pay for it and it was really a day off
work for me, but his seminar itself is not something I would pay money for.

I do think ESPN, weather.com, etc., are interesting examples because they have
so much information to present, and it is nice that he was so forthcoming with
concrete examples of what he holds up as great presentations of data. But I
didn't find his analysis of them all that deep, and I think he made the
fallacy of assuming that these sites are popular because of their presentation
rather than, well, they're just websites of immensely well-known
organizations. And weather.com is _weather.com_ for God's sake--the URL alone
guarantees readership.

~~~
phy6
I had weather.gov written down in my notes, I think we also saw weather.com.
Thanks for clarifying. I also went for 'free' but that was 8 hours I could
have spent writing code or playing with D3.

Did he also spend ~40 minutes ooh-ing over Google Image search? I remember
seeing a bunch of blue sailboats or something and he was going on and on
saying he _prints out_ pages of google image search collages (except he had
some artsy name that was more hipster than collage).

------
didgeoridoo
Well that nearly gave me a heart attack. I thought for a moment that this was
an obituary. Hope he sticks with us for a long time.

~~~
vidarh
My reaction too. That's a rather odd way of presenting an article.

------
eshvk
Edward Tufte says Bret Victor [1] is someone to watch out for. I am curious:
can someone who is into usability look at the site and comment on whether this
is considered usable? I mean his site is incredibly innovative and beautiful.
However, I find it kind of hard to navigate?

[1] [http://worrydream.com/](http://worrydream.com/)

~~~
guywithabike
It's not about the website, it's about the content. If you read the articles,
I think you'll be suitably blown away. Example:
[http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction](http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction)

~~~
eshvk
Oh no, I am impressed. The guy is as close as one can come to be a modern
renaissance man. The website is also a statement of art and I was curious how
it came across from a usability perspective.

------
hrabago
I've put in a request to my boss to attend his one day seminar last year.
However, recent reviews of attendees say his views haven't caught up with
modern times and he just sticks to visualization techniques from years ago.

~~~
thrush
I recommend getting his books, or just The Visual Display of Information
([http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi](http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi))
if you don't want to go a seminar.

~~~
haberman
Just to put in a contrary opinion, I was really disappointed in this book and
I don't understand the praise it gets. Here's my extensive review on Amazon:
[http://www.amazon.com/review/R11NYC3OE3LBE](http://www.amazon.com/review/R11NYC3OE3LBE)

~~~
Silhouette
Personally, I came to very different conclusions. I found the book thought-
provoking, and while your criticisms seem to be factually accurate, so was the
original material you were criticising in each case I checked.

I am upvoting you anyway, because we should never take things for granted just
because someone famous said them, and because I appreciate that you took the
time to make a careful and reasonable argument even if I personally disagree
with it.

~~~
haberman
I am really curious to know what you took from this book. I am really confused
about why people like it so much.

For example, do you like Tufte's box plot? Do you like his revised bar chart?
Do you strive, in your own graphs, to "erase redundant data-ink" in the way
that Tufte advocates?

~~~
Silhouette
I read the book not long after it was first published and relatively early in
my career.

What I found useful was not the spartan presentation. I do a lot of custom UI
and data visualisation work these days, but even my plainest designs don't
tend to be as extreme as many of Tufte's examples.

However, numerous projects I've worked on have been influenced by his
underlying themes, like avoiding misleading presentation and unnecessary
clutter, using graphics to convey patterns and relationships that wouldn't
stand out from the raw data, and most of all how effective a customised or
completely original presentation style can be depending on the nature of the
data and what you're trying to illustrate.

Maybe if I read the book for the first time today I'd regard a lot of the
ideas as obvious or trivial, just as I don't need to read another article on
different types of colour scheme or how to choose well-matched fonts any more.
For on-line use, where we have tools like colour and animation and interaction
readily available, I certainly do things very differently. However, a lot of
the way I look at data visualisation and graphical illustration today was no
doubt shaped by reading Tufte early on, and so I give him the credit I feel is
due.

------
danso
In the five years that I've practiced data visualization and analysis, the
day-long Tufte seminar that my boss sent me to was likely the most important
single day of my development career. Tufte has virtually nothing to say about
how visualization should be done off paper, but his general principles are
invaluable. I was still making annoying Flash charts at the time, shortly
after attending Tufte's workshop, I realized how much of an anti-pattern it is
to rely heavily on button-pushing and on-hovers.

It's true that Tufte's pioneering work was done in the age of paper, but that
simplicity and clarity of purpose is even in greater need today.

(And I'll also say, Jesus Christ this submitted headline made me fear that he
was dead)

Edit: I can't avoid saying that some of the more contemporary ideas he's
really into are sometimes a little boring compared to his data visualization
ideas...if you live in New York, Tufte has a gallery of art that he's done and
space devoted to others' ideas...I thought the documentary on the designer
mentioned in the OP was a little dry. Also, at his gallery, Tufte has a short
video on loop about how he'd improve the Apple iPhone weather app...I forgot
the details but I remember thinking that I disagreed with a lot of what he
proposed.

(On certain days of the week, Tufte is actually in the gallery...he was very
nice to talk to)

His gallery:
[http://etmodern.com/ETmodern/ET_Modern.html](http://etmodern.com/ETmodern/ET_Modern.html)

~~~
fsck--off
> It's true that Tufte's pioneering work was done in the age of paper, but
> that simplicity and clarity of purpose is even in greater need today.

His principles aren't infallible. This 2007 study found that a group of
students preferred a graph with "chart junk" to Tufte's minimalist style,
although the study does note that this may have been caused by the students'
familiarity with "chart junk" graphs.

[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1362587](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1362587)

~~~
bulletsvshumans
There's a semi-recent study showing that people's recollection of the material
two weeks later is higher when they see a chart junk version vs. the clean
chart. That's the real game changer imho.

------
yannis
For anyone wishing to emulate Tufte's style in books using LaTeX,
[http://www.ctan.org/pkg/tufte-latex](http://www.ctan.org/pkg/tufte-latex).

------
taylorbuley
If you're looking for a more quantitative version of Tufte, I highly recommend
Cleveland ([http://www.amazon.com/Visualizing-Data-William-S-
Cleveland/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Visualizing-Data-William-S-
Cleveland/dp/0963488406/)) and Wilkinson ([http://www.amazon.com/The-Grammar-
Graphics-Statistics-Comput...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Grammar-Graphics-
Statistics-Computing/dp/0387245448))

~~~
kylebgorman
The difference between Cleveland and Tufte is that the former is "empirical"
(he discusses lots of results from psychological studies on comprehension of
graphics) rather than one man's opinion. Also, Cleveland actually has
accomplished something other than scolding and praising.

Personally, I liked Cleveland's "Elements of Graphing Data"
([http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Graphing-Data-William-
Clevela...](http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Graphing-Data-William-
Cleveland/dp/0963488414)) better than "Visualizing Data", though they overlap
a lot.

------
pyrocat
He's a legend from days of yore, but his books and presentations really don't
talk about the web or even modern technology. It's great if you're working in
traditional graphic design, and there are some core concepts you can take and
apply to web design, but I don't see why people think he's some hero of modern
design.

------
blueatlas
I found Designing with Data
([http://www.designingwithdata.com/](http://www.designingwithdata.com/)) to be
a simple and practical introduction to data visualization.

I attended Tufte's seminar years ago, and found it entertaining, but that's
about it.

------
jmount
Another good source on visual presentation (of data) is Cleveland (author of
"The Elements of Graphing Data", see [http://www.win-
vector.com/blog/2013/02/revisiting-clevelands...](http://www.win-
vector.com/blog/2013/02/revisiting-clevelands-the-elements-of-graphing-data-
in-ggplot2/) ). The neat thing is Cleveland formally tested a lot of his
visualization principles (asking people to estimate things from different
graphs).

------
wallflower
I've talked to multiple people who have been to Tufte's seminars. They all,
unfortunately, say the same thing: in person, he's not a very dynamic teacher
- maybe even a bit boring.

That does not detract from his ability to bring data visualization to the
mainstream.

