Edward Tufte As It Happens Notes

These are notes taken as it happens at the Tufte talk. They are probably inaccurate.

(My comments in brackets.)
(There is an annoying woman to my right. Doddsy keeps texting me.)

A centaur wordle - Centaurus constellation.

1612 Gallieo 'Saturn looks like this' and as your eye gets tired 'it looks like that'. This and that, best piece of comparative visual design ever. (That must be where Jones nicked 'glanceable' from.)

Seems to be suggesting beauty will come from clarity of communication. (Good.)

The Chinese had maps about right by around 1050.

Napoleon's march etc.

Your task is for users to understand the information. The way to be a great designer is to get people to not notice your work. (Broadly agree.)

Seems to be saying ignore fashion in data design. Aim for comprehension from people who know nothing about the data. Clarity, comprehension over convenience. (Selling souls in an empty church etc etc)

(On a piece of data design) document everything and tell people about it.

(It's a bit dry.)

Don't cherry pick.

(It's very dry.)

There are only two industries that call their customers users. (Very good.)

PowerPoint is rubbish. (Not really, it's the stuff people put on it that's rubbish.)

Talking about Sparklines now.
(I wonder if he'll mention the Dopplr logo.)
(Joking aside, the use of a Sparkline in the Dopplr logo is very smart.)

(This Sparlines stuff is very good, but we've heard it all before. Haven't we?)

"the right question is better than the exact answer to the wrong question"

My next book. (Hurrah, the new album! And the annoying woman is leaving!)

Stuff about his Obama gig.

Stuff about his new art gallery.

(Was that it?)

(The questions are rubbish. As always. Leaving.)

Comments

[claire]

Hilarious. It's almost like I'm there.

[Adam]

I like Tufte's work, I really do. I've almost book his books. I read them and I think, brilliant, this'll really help, and it does, to a point. It's the complete opposite of the vapid data visualisations out there - meaningful, tangible, understandable, but, and this is what I struggle with, pretty dull. There's something missing, call it flair or whatever, but I'm not 100% convinced. I wish his work looked more like the typographic mockups on the H&FJ website.

[Daniel]

i was a little disappointed by the talk. No focus at all – just a few of the greatest hits in no particular order. I was expecting The Best Presentation Ever, but it turns out he's better at theory than practice. (And this also goes for his website, which is just horrible to use. He seemed to justify it as "Well the New York Times has 400 links on their homepage, so why can't I?".)

And he reminded me a bit of that Fast Show character: "mumble mumble … Napoleon … mumble … sparklines! … mumble mumble … very very drunk".

[J. Nathan Matias]

what would you have asked him?

(note: I asked the last question)