Tufte, Edward

1942–

Information Design Pioneer

Edward R. Tufte is professor emeritus of statistics and political science at Yale University. After studying statistics at Stanford University, he earned a doctorate in political science at Yale. He was always interested in visual phenomena; he began to paint on the day he completed his dissertation, and has been making art ever since.

Tufte's first book on graphic design was The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which he published in 1983. It became a bestseller, and propelled Tufte to a level of public fame rarely achieved by statistics professors. In 1990, Tufte published Envisioning Information; in 1997, he published Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative.

Tufte's goals are to understand the way that information works and to develop principles for better information. He has been a seminal figure in the field of information design, which he approaches with a scientific rigor that enables the discovery and application of broad, general principles, in contrast to the cookbook approach generally used by designers.

Tufte approaches design using the analytic principles of science and computing. He is a rigorous thinker who respects the tools of design more than many designers do, bringing such tools as typography, color, vision, and layout to scientific data. He believes that the tools of graphic design are important to human knowledge and decision-making; his mission is to understand how these tools can be put to best use.

According to Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is about pictures of numbers. Envisioning Information is about pictures of nouns, because maps, or aerial photographs, show nouns lying on the ground. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative is about pictures of verbs; it considers graphs and models that show motion, dynamic systems, mechanics, and processes. Each book is richly illustrated with the information artifacts that Tufte describes, and each is designed as a model of the principles it presents.

Tufte's books also offer concise summaries of the principles that he has developed in studying information artifacts. For example, Visual Display offers nine points that summarize principles for communicating complex ideas clearly, precisely, and efficiently:

• 1.
  Excellent statistical graphs show the data.
• 2.
  They focus on substance rather than method or graphic technology.
• 3.
  They do not distort the data through content or visual presentation.
• 4.
  They present many numbers in a small space.
• 5.
  They make large data sets coherent.
• 6.
  They encourage visual comparison of different pieces of data.
• 7.
  They reveal data at several levels of detail, giving a broad overview while offering fine structure.
• 8.
  They serve a clear purpose; they describe, explore, tabulate, or decorate.
• 9.
  They are closely integrated with the statistical and verbal descriptions of the data sets they present.

Tufte's vision of excellence involves revealing relationships among data, among the factors that the data represent, and among the concepts that can be [Page 443]used to explore them. The concise, elegant presentation of significant relationships is at the core of Tufte's thinking. Visual Display demonstrates how to achieve it and what to avoid.

Using intelligent techniques to present information well is also the core issue of Envisioning Information. “Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information,” Tufte states. “And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity, rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication.” Tufte's ideal designer is a thinker and a strategist.

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