Beautiful Evidence
by Edward R. Tufte
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Book Reviews of Beautiful Evidence
Book Review: Essential Reading for Designers
Summary: 5 Stars
Disclosure: I am huge fan of Edward R. Tufte.
As a professional designer and part-time educator, I create presentations and reports every week to review with customers and students. Over the years I have developed a style that I like to use, which can be called "minimal". Tufte's work over the years has given helped me refine ideas and given me justifiable reasons to promote stylistic elements in my own, and other's presentations.
The book is truly a culmination of Tufte's ideas to date. Many of the concepts and techniques from his previous works are further defined and tailored to new examples. This tome considers a greater variety of communication and information. Many of his concepts continue to be refined, new ideas (new to me anyway), such as 'sparklines' are introduced and explored. I am amazed that every time I re-read a Tufte volume, I take away something new, usually because I am working on a different project with its own special information requirements, and I am able to see new opportunities for clarity.
What this book, and Tufte's others lack, is description of how to implement what you may learn here. Realize that this is not a step-by-step guide to presentations. The theories here, such as the inclusion of graphics in-line with text to further enhance comprehension of the stated ideas, can be easily implemented if you know your computer tools and have a desire to make better communications. There is little description of how to achieve what these ideals propose.
The book itself is also physically beautiful with heavy stock and perfect printing and graphics. It is part textbook, part heirloom. This is a comprehensive text covering many forms of visual communication. If you want to explore Tufte, but don't want to invest in all of his works, I recommend starting with this book.
Book Review: A great guide for what to do with high-resolution display devices
Summary: 5 Stars
Out of all of the great ideas that are in this book, I am going to concentrate on the ones that relate to "what can be done with high-resolution display devices," such as 1200 dpi printers. An increasing amount of contemporary design is done for low-resolution displays, such as television and computer monitors. If we get a 1200 dpi version of one of these designs, as is easily possible with an inexpensive laser printer, we are not getting much benefit from that increased resolution. A lot of the ideas in Beautiful Evidence can be used today with Web scripts that generate PDF files to be printed. The rest of the ideas will be waiting for designers 20 years from now when computer monitors finally catch up to paper.
dea 1: Sparklines (there are examples on the author's Web site). Tufte points out that nothing stops the modern printer from including small graphs right in-line with text or tables and that these graphs make comparisons much easier. Baseball fans will enjoy Tufte's depiction of a baseball season, first for one team and then for all teams. Tufte argues convincingly that showing history in a "sparkline" reduces "recency bias, the persistent and widespread over-weighting of recent events in making decisions."
Idea 2: Forcing people to write English sentences instead of PowerPoint bullets results in a lot more clarity, especially with respect to causality.
Idea 3: If you're running a business, figure out how to pack a huge amount of information, including sparklines, onto a single 11×17 sheet of paper and print it out on a laserprinter, then give it to decision makers. With that one sheet of paper, they will have as much information as 15 computer screenfuls or 300 PowerPoint slides.
A thought-provoking book that will reward repeat scrutiny.
Book Review: Flawed
Summary: 2 Stars
I am a big fan of Edward Tufte and his previous books. So I was excited when I was given this new book last year. Unfortunately it took a full year to work through it since it's full of bad writing, redundant graphics, boring topics, and pet jargon.
The text is just very dense, filled with lists of terms when the author wants to be sure he covers the bases: "The analysis of cause and effect, initially bivariate, quickly becomes multivariate through such necessary elaborations as the conditions under which the causal relation holds, interaction effects, multiple causes, multiple effects, causal sequences, source of bias, spurious correlation, sources of measurement error, competing variables, and whether the alleged cause is merely a proxy or a marker variable."
He also falls in love with his own jargon: depedestalization, PP, Phluff, pitch culture, economisting. The book has a few typos, which suggests that he couldn't get an editor to stomach proofreading the whole thing.
Much of the material in this book was already presented in sections of his other books and pamphlets: Minards map of the French invasion of Russia, chartjunk, loss of shuttles due to Powerpoint bullets, sparklines, cognitive styles of Powerpoint.
One really annoying habit is that when a graphic is discussed on more than one page, it is reprinted on each of those pages. The Minard map appears six times, at different scales and positions! At other times the graphics are plopped across the crease between pages.
If you've never read Tufte's other books you might learn something from this one, but most of it is presented better elsewhere.
Book Review: Beautifully done
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a fitting companion to Tufte's three earlier books on presenting. Like the others, its construction is strong and physically beautiful. Its clear layout pervasively demonstrates its points about organization of visual data. In a few places, an image crosses the fold in the two-page spread; images bleed back to the binding, so the centermost part of the image is sometimes hard to read. That's my only criticism - please note how small a criticism it is.
Tufte uses this book to convey one large message: unite your text and imagery. They are a whole, and separating them damages the whole of your presentation. Trying to repair that damage causes even more problems - inept cross-referencing, erratic jumping between different parts of a book, and other bumbling stitchery that tries to repair the rent text.
Tufte offers many specific examples and suggestions for presenting the unified image. Since his writing demonstrates the density of information he proposes, and since it is too heavily visual for the review of this text to capture, I must direct you to the book itself to see what it's really about. The only section that I couldn't understand as part of a unified whole was the last chapter. Although its discussion of statuary and its pedestal relates clearly to Tufte's despised "chartjunk," his portfolio of his own large-scale sculpture seemed gratuitous - enjoyable, perhaps, but tangential and self-indulgent. That doesn't weaken any of his points, though. If you present complex ideas, you must have this book.
//wiredweird
Book Review: Recycled? No problem!
Summary: 5 Stars
I for one am the opposite of the people who read this and, as fans of Tufte's other works, felt let down. There seem to be a lot of complaints about recycled material. Yes, a lot of stuff in here is found in his other books. Yes, his whole Cognitive Style of PowerPoint pamphlet is reproduced here (I think?). No, I don't think that's a problem and in fact I think this is his best work ever.
I once owned Tufte's other three books, but sold them. They had no use to me, I found them to be a bit too... fluffy. But I picked up Beautiful Evidence and thought I had struck gold. A lot of his great ideas are concentrated, and yeah there's some fluff but he saves it for the end, where it belongs. I have actually put this book to serious, heavy use, which I cannot say for any of Tufte's other works.
Is this review helpful to all of you possible buyers? Probably not. If you loved his other works, you are likely to feel some disappointment at spending forty five bucks or so on stuff you already have. But if you didn't like Tufte before (and I know there's plenty of you out there) you might find a reason to now. It seems as if this is Tufte's way of streamlining his really good ideas for maximum usage. With a little fluff tossed in, of course.