Visual explanations: images and quantities, evidence and narrative

Abstract

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Edward R. Tufte. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997. Specialists in esoteric fields can become cult figures in their own time. Carl Sagan in astronomy and Stephen Hawking in physics have achieved that status. A third cult figure has emerged: Edward R. Tufte, in the field of information design. The author of works on subjects as varied as graphic design, statistics, and political economy, Tufte is building his own legend. Through his books and public lectures, he serves as historian and theoretician of graphic and information design, advocate of the pairing of illustrations and words, and teacher of audiences as diverse as technical writers, illustrators, and statisticians. In the early 1980s Tufte founded a publishing company to produce his books on information design, thereby gaining control of their appearance and distribution. One result of his founding the company is that the books do not go out of print. Another is that he controls their distribution and physical appearance. His books look as their author wishes them to lookfull of gorgeous color illustrations and what I call adult learning toys: three-dimensional pop-ups and lift-up flaps that conceal intriguing or astonishing information. The books assemble illustrations and text from many centuries and cultures and from authorities in numerous fields: statistics, music, medicine, painting, engraving, cartography, graphics, computer display design, and business correspondence. Tufte's Visual Explanations (1997) forms a triptych with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983) and the multiple-award winning Envisioning Information (1990). The design principles he explores in these books are applicable to images delivered in print as well as electronically. The books should be required reading for those interested in ways that data can be used to both inform us and lie to us. Tufte's work has already been embraced by statisticians, technical writers, graphics designers, designers of computer displays of all kinds, including Web pages, architects, scientists, engineers, and aficionados of art history. The text of Visual Explanations touches on graphics history, iconography, and design theory. The purpose of the text is to explain the persuasive and storytelling power of the creative elements available to information designers: images, words, dimension, duration, and motion. The illustrations in Visual Explanations support the text's purpose, and do it in an engaging way. Illustrations consume approximately half of the generously sized pages. That is Tufte's preference and his chief message throughout the three books: welldesigned graphics can convey in a single image what may take numerous pages to report in words. The graphics also demonstrate Tufte's lesson that an illustration can convey instantly information difficult for the mind to grasp if presented as prose. In Visual Explanations, Tufte reinforces a principle he announced in his first book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (168): if you have a lot of data to report, use graphics, perhaps with verbal labels. If you have little data to report, use words. He also iterates in new contexts several ideas and terms he presented in the earlier books: the concept of the flatland of the page and the computer screen (Visual Explanations 141, Envisioning Information 12-35), the notion of chart junk (Visual Explanations 48, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information 107-121, Envisioning Information 34) that clutters many illustrations and detracts from the clarity of their messages, the idea of using color as a quantifier as well as a decorative element (Visual Explanations 76-77, Envisioning Information 91), and the value of repeated elements he calls small multiples (Visual Explanations 104-109, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information 170-175, Envisioning Information 67-79). …