
Lists: design and construction (2007) - danso
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002QF
======
threefour
Before I read Tufte I assumed my fellow designers were learning bushels of
information design skills from his books that I sorely lacked.

After reading Tufte, I realize it's wonderfully pleasing design porn, and the
teaching is usually at another URL.

------
patal
"An analysis in the Harvard Business Review found generic, superficial,
simplistic thinking in bullet lists widely used in business planning and
corporate strategy"

I don't think this is related to bullet lists. The sentence contains the same
truce if we took out the words "in bullet lists".

~~~
dragonwriter
> I don't think this is related to bullet lists.

I think its closely related to bullet lists, both as a cause of them and as an
effect of them; bullet lists are a mechanism (but, to be sure, certainly not
the _sole_ mechanism) by which generic, superficial, simplistic thinking
protects itself against the intrusion of meaningful, deep analysis.

------
jdimov9
Can someone provide a 6-point bullet list with the TL;DR of this
(meta-)article?

~~~
ThomPete
Depending on how much you know about Tufte:

Tuftes basic principle is to use as little "ink" to show let the data provide
as much information as possible. I would claim this is still his most
important and fundamental principle.

With ink he normally means other elements (line divider, borders, gradients)
than the data elements themselves.

Tufte is known for taking any kind of graph or visualization and trying to
remove as many things from it and through the process make things clearer than
they were.

In this essay he is looking at lists and going through different ways to think
about lists and how they sometimes hide important information because of the
way they are constructed. He is a known critic of PowerPoints bulleted lists.

Personally I belive he has several great points about information and have
many great examples of his work.

But his basic theory I would claim is whats important to practice and once you
understand that it really is just a question of practice to apply the
principles.

~~~
wbeckler
I think jdimov9 was trying to make a little joke. But it's a great TLDR

