
How Useful Is Tufte for Making Maps? (2007) - floatingatoll
http://makingmaps.net/2007/08/16/how-useful-is-tufte-for-making-maps/
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macintux
For anyone who hasn't had the opportunity: I highly recommend taking Tufte's
one-day class. You get a copy of his books and get to see at least one or two
truly historic texts (it's been 20 years for me, so I don't remember off-hand
what he had with him).

Plus he's a tremendously bright man with entertaining anecdotes.

So, even though I don't think that anything he shared that day has been useful
in my career, it was a life-enriching experience.

~~~
3JPLW
Interesting; I've also been highly discouraged from attending his class from a
recent attendee. She felt he wasn't invested in actually presenting the
material and it just felt like an advertising racket to buy his books. Things
may have changed in the past 20 years.

~~~
paloaltokid
I went earlier this year and I thought it was a good experience. The key is to
arrive on time and sit there and do the silent reading that he assigns before
the lecture starts.

I sat in the front and he approached me. He was friendly, asked me what I did,
made some suggestions on books and articles to explore. He also signed my
book, which was cool.

I'd take the class again for sure.

I think it's important to just go in with an open mind and not treat
everything he says as gospel. I think he presents some ideas that very much
cut against the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley and that was nice to
hear.

So yeah, I think it'd be worth your time to go. Plus, just because someone
else didn't like it doesn't mean you won't get a lot out of it. Unless you go
and see for yourself, you can't really know.

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gumby
I feel this is true of Tufte in general (and I own his books and have taken
his seminar): he has made, and finds, excellent examples of good design but
his heuristics (they are never as strong as "rules") are rarely actionable.

~~~
vamin
If you want actionable, I highly recommend Jean-Luc Doumont's "Trees Maps and
Theorems." It's like a way more practical, actionable version of Tufte's work.
Probably my favorite book on communicating with data. He's a great speaker as
well, do take the opportunity to see one of his talks if you can (I believe
some are on YouTube).

~~~
matiasz
I completely agree! Doumont often gives talks at universities that are open to
the public.

[http://www.principiae.be/X0200.php](http://www.principiae.be/X0200.php)

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haberman
I really don't get people's admiration of "The Visual Display of Quantitative
Information." I bought and read it years ago with great excitement, but felt
very let down by it. I wrote a detailed Amazon review about it:
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-
reviews/R11NYC3OE3LBE/ref...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-
reviews/R11NYC3OE3LBE/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1930824130)

~~~
jacobolus
I think you basically entirely missed the point of the book, to the point of
obtuse deliberate misreading. Given the amount of work you clearly put into
your review, and your apparent ability to write (and presumably comprehend)
coherent sentences, I’m baffled.

You don’t seem to understand at all what Tufte means by chartjunk (even though
he prints dozens of explicit examples and explains what is wrong with each one
at length), you don’t seem to understand what he is getting at with the
thought-experiment-like demonstrations of chapter 6. You have an overly
literal and pedantic reading of his tongue-in-cheek dry humor. And you seem to
have completely skipped the detailed analysis and explanations of the
principles laid out in the book if you think that “Tufte's principles totally
ignore the primary purpose of graphs, which is to show a data set's _patterns_
(or lack thereof) to humans.” My one-sentence summary of the book would be
“information graphics need to spend more effort on showing patterns.” That’s
the central abiding message of the book, which Tufte hits us all over the head
with again and again, on almost every page.

~~~
haberman
> My one-sentence summary of the book would be “information graphics need to
> spend more effort on showing patterns.” That’s the central abiding message
> of the book, which Tufte hits us all over the head with again and again, on
> almost every page.

I just searched the book for the word "pattern" and it appears on only six
pages in the entire book. Tufte throughout the book is far more impressed with
how many data points you can jam into a graph than how clearly the graph
conveys a pattern or idea.

I'm also curious which of Tufte's statements I quoted that you think were
intended to be taken tongue-in-cheek. They all seem pretty straightforward and
factual.

Your reply reinforces my belief that most people's admiration of this book has
to do with what they imagine it says, rather than what it actually says.

~~~
jacobolus
I would reply at length and quote extensively from every section of the book,
but 15 years of internet arguments has convinced me there’s really little
point and it would be largely a waste of time. If you can even flip through
the pages in a few seconds and come to the conclusion that Tufte doesn’t care
about how clearly graphics convey data, there’s really nothing I’m going to
say that can convince you. So I’ll just leave it at “bae, you cray-cray”.

I can only recommend re-reading the book closely and carefully, ideally
spending 5 or 10 minutes really looking at and thinking about each graphic.
Maybe start with the first few pages where Tufte lays out his criteria for
graphical excellence.

You may also want to look at his 2 subsequent books _Envisioning Information_
and _Visual Explanations_ wherein he goes into considerably more detail about
particular aspects and techniques statistical graphics can use to show various
types of patterns.

I have probably spent 50 hours over the years studying Tufte’s four data-viz
books, and every time I look I find something enlightening, fascinating, or
inspiring. Some individual pages reward 30 minutes or more of careful study.
If you can’t find anything useful inside, I don’t know what to tell you.

~~~
haberman
> If you can even flip through the pages in a few seconds and come to the
> conclusion that Tufte doesn’t care about how clearly graphics convey data

That's not what I said. If you project your own meaning onto my 100-word
comment, it does not surprise me that you project your own meaning onto an
entire book.

~~~
jacobolus
\----

~~~
haberman
I'm glad that you like the book. If your goal was to share your positive
feelings about it, "obtuse deliberate misreading" and "bae, you cray-cray" may
not have been your best strategies. If you want people to be kind and
understanding, don't start with insults and insinuations.

It is also not convincing when you say that I missed the tongue-in-cheek dry
humor but decline to say which of my quoted passages you think were intended
to be humorous.

I read this book because I had high hopes for it. It disappointed me a lot.

I understood your sentence. You didn't understand mine: I made a clear
distinction between _data_ and _patterns /ideas_. I think Tufte overemphasizes
data and underemphasizes patterns/ideas.

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technologia
Colleagues of mine treat Tufte's work like a literal ten commandments. I can't
really fault his logic on the minimalism and he's certainly earned his rep in
the GIS space, which really can be applied to pretty much any visualization.

I'm just curious why this post is making a recurrence now, is this because of
the twilio post that made its way to the HN frontpage?

~~~
floatingatoll
I hadn't seen that, thanks! For others, it's at:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274509](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274509)

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jrochkind1
> Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number
> of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.

I think that's good for web design too.

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mcguire
" _Commandment 5: Map Layout Matters, includes (19). Layout is a bigger issue
than this one point from Tufte and it is an issue that is not stressed in map
design texts (although I do devote a decent chunk of a chapter in Making Maps
to map layout). It is difficult to talk about map layout (or the layout of
information graphics in general) in the abstract. But layout strongly effects
the look and feel of the map, and can make a map easy or difficult to read and
interpret._ "

Most (all?) states in the US provide free road maps at the welcome centers on
major roads entering the state. For many years, the map of the state of Texas
had the panhandle, the squarish bit that sticks up to the north, separated and
plopped in the middle of where New Mexico should be.

Somebody apparently complained and then the new maps that came out contained
the whole of Texas, well connected. As a result, these maps were much, much
larger than the previous maps, given that you're kind of limited in the scale
of a road map and that they were now including a majority of the states of New
Mexico and Oklahoma.

Sometimes the best presentation isn't the best presentation.

------
sogen
A more useful book is Alberto Cairo's Storytelling with Data, great examples
and the reasoning behind it.

And yes I have Tufte's books too.

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lazzlazzlazz
Tufte is a collector of some good design, but having seen him at a conference
and gone through his books, he actually has very little grasp of the general
principles at play. I wouldn't recommend him.

~~~
brailsafe
That seems unlikely, but I'm curious. Do you have an example of a general
principle that you think he hasn't grasped and why?

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csours
OT: Has anyone done a similar distillation for the 12 factor app? As I was
reading up on 12 factor, it seemed like you could distill it into 4 principles
or so.

~~~
optimuspaul
I have definitely done that in my mind. I don't agree with all of the items in
12 factor. The principles that drive those 12 factors are ones that I follow,
just not the specific implementation that is presented. I don't know that it
distills down to 4 or whatever number, but I'm certain it is less than 12. For
example I don't think that it's always appropriate to store config in the
environment variables. But the principle of not embedding config in code is
one that I follow.

