Envisioning Information

As a coffee table book, Envisioning Information is gorgeous. You will behold luscious colors, faithfully reproduced images with fine detail, and a fine collection of some of the best and worst of informative graphics. It's a splendid portfolio of some ingenious visual displays of complex information.

For theoreticians, it's a mind-jogger and demands a critical review of how you display information today. Are we being demanding enough? Simple enough? Clear enough? There is more than one way to display information and this portfolio challenges us to think harder.

As a practial guide, however, this tome is slim. It's a quick read - I went through it briskly in about two hours. And it does contain a few useful nuggets, especially the before-and-after images showing how too much color, over-heavy borders and other thoughtless ornamentation detracts from the information. However, it was not enough for me. I want a book chock full of practical guidance on how to convert data into clear information, and this book is a veritable beauty contest of successful images without much practical guidance so that practitioners could achieve the same.

Book is in good condition, shipped quickly. I am very satisfied with this process and result.

Tufte follows up his debut classic with an even more beautiful piece of graphic art disguised as a guide to ways to display three (and more) dimensions on a flat surface.

While even more beautifully crafted than The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition, it has less in the way of practical guidance. Tufte's principle here can be reduced to this far-reaching but not so simply-implemented statement: increase the resolution of "flatland" (paper or computer screen) to show more data to increase clarity.

As usual, the principle is lavishly illustrated with beautifully-reproduced examples of good and bad ways of envisioning information. In fact, I have found Tufte's principle and illustrations are useful ways of thinking about how to improve my own graphics, but I find my ability to implement them frustrated by the limitations of the design tools I use most: Excel, PowerPoint, Project, Word, wikis. That is a negative reflection on the tools, not on Tufte.

In any case, enjoy Tufte's books now for the portable affordable art that they are, and hope for the tools to catch up soon.

Nutshell review - This is a beautiful resource on presenting information in a myriad of ways with many examples of good and bad design. Beautifully illustrated.

Every time I go back to this book I get something more out of it. Over the past 10 years I've been through my copy a couple of dozen times. If communicating information is important to you, you should take a look at this classic.