whitespace. a lot of it. , 16. April 2007

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is the only book from the series(?) i ... own. i would have written _read_, if there wasn't this nagging feeling that most (the core ideas) of the books content would have fitted on a leaflet. leaflets would lend themselves even better to dispension, so i advocate this new format for the 'book'.

there are some nice historical examples of how _not_ to do it, and of how the displaying of information was always used as a means for manipulating the viewer, plus some easy 1-2-3 guidelines for avoiding the pitfalls of manipulation and bad design, BUT this mostly applies for histograms and 2D plots. Newer formats, including color, 3D, video and contour-plots are passingly mentioned, without guidelines, opinions or any type of helpful comment.

the picture on the cover (a brilliantly displayed train schedule) says it all: look at this piece of specialized display, realize it is great, look around you, realize how many bad data-displays there are, and now think of you own, specialized way of displaying your own, specialized data.
there is no spoon.

       Good book, but price jumped up lately, 28. Februar 2003

The book is very good and instructive. I bought it just about two weeks ago on this site.
What makes me wonder is why the price jumped up from about 50 to 80 Euros?

      Sets the stage for all information architects, 25. Mai 2000

This book will teach you some basics on how to most effectively present quantitative information using various sorts of graphs and charts. Afterwards you will know how and why you should get rid of chart junk (gridlines, tick marks, ornaments, etc.) or alternatively using some of the examples on bad design presented, you will see how to manipulate your audience using the "Lie Factor". Actually the advice given in this book could easily fit within just one piece of paper, but then: This book is simply beautiful. It is state of the art for printed books, you almost feel a passion for it. Mr. Tufte takes his own medicine: No words in this book are superfluous. Illustrations and examples are carefully selected and reprinted with the utmost care. It takes no more than some hours to read the book, but afterwards you can use more than just a few hours to study the examples of timeless graphic displays. The only reason why this book is short of five stars is the following: Mr. Tufte uses quite some space providing statistics about charts found in different publications (chart junk percentages, lie factor. Personally I find this information fairly irrelevant and would have preferred more examples of chart remakes. However this book is definately still a MUST have!

       Extremely well researched book on what makes good design., 8. Februar 2000

You know what's so good about this book? The research, that's what. In showing both good and bad graphic design, Tufte has examples from as far back as 1686, and many examples from the 18th,19th & 20th centuries and from many different countries.

Good graphic design, he argues, reveals the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space. Interestingly, some of the best examples of this come from the pre-computer era, when graphics had to be drawn by hand (and therefore more thought had to go into their design, rather than the author just calling up the Bar Graph template on the desktop.) For example, that picture you can see on the front cover of the book is actually a train timetable that packs a whole list of arrivals and departures at many different stations into a single little picture. A better example (and the "best statistical graphic ever drawn") shows Napoleon's route through Europe. It shows a) the map b) where he went c) how many people were in his army at each point and d) the temperature on the way back that killed off his army. At a glance you can see the factors that led to his army losing. AND it was drawn by hand in 1885 and is little more than a line drawing!

He also gives examples of really bad design, (including "the worst graphic ever to make it to print"), and shows what makes it so bad. His examples prove that information-less, counter-intuitive graphics can still look dazzlingly pretty, even though they're useless. In some examples, he shows how small changes can make the difference between an awful graphic and a really good one. My favourite example of this is how he drew the inter-quartile ranges on the x and y axes of a scatterplot, thus adding more information to the graphic without cluttering it up.

In summary, there's a lot more to good graphic design than being an Adobe guru. Reading this book made me feel like a more discerning viewer of graphics!

       An elegant and highly informative reference work, a classic., 30. August 1999

This is one of the finest reference works I have read. It is lucid, elegant and beautifully presented. Highly recommended.