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Wednesday, April 30, 2003 |
Say something once, why say it again?
Edward Tufte has started a moderated forum for information design questions, sometimes answered by him. If you do any work with graphics at all, you will bump into his work (just yesterday, I was in the office of a video producer here on campus, who has the famous graphic of Napoleon's invasion of Russia graphic framed on her wall, an image that most people today got from Tufte's discussion of it in his first book.Tufte is a wonderful, acerbic critic of graphic design, creator of such terms as "ducks" (weird graphics, like a comparison of armies using different sized soldier silhouettes instead of plain columns or bars), "chartjunk" (additional graphics that do not add to the information conveyed by the chart) and "data-ink" (the ratio of actual data to the ink in the graphic). Drop his name into a search engine and you'll find many links to his work; a typical appreciation can be found at the Center for Spacially Integrated Social Science's CSISS Classics page
I looked at his website when it first appeared, but back then it was fairly static, and since I already own his books I didn't go back for a long time. This is quite cool.
