Beautiful Evidence - Edward R. Tufte

Beautiful Design (2006, Graphics Press LLC, Cambridge USA) is Edward Tufte's fourth book in a series discussing and analysing the visual presentation of data. According to the introduction, there is a fifth volume planned.

Beautiful Design is a really lovely and luxurious volume, copiously illustrated throughout. I read this book immediately after The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and unfortunately I have to say I was a little disappointed by the comparison. Minard's Grande Armee chart makes a reappearance, not once, not twice, but five times in this volume! This is within a nice chapter describing a set of principles of analytical desig (there are six in all). As usual, Tufte can get a little didactic, but I found that, while I perhaps disagree with his stonger statements, he's always an entertaining read, exemplified by his deconstruction and explanation of Minard's graphics

The major contribution here is the sparkline, small graphics intended to be embedded in text and tables. In fact they are just the sort of thing we see in many genome mapping papers where considerable quantities of data need to be clearly communicated in summary fashion. Tufte's website hosts a forum with an interesting discussion of sparkline implementation.

Tufte devotes an entire chapter to the evils of PowerPoint. He absolutely HATES it! Entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, it is available as a separately published pamphlet. Now, while I agree one does sit through some desperately bad PowerPoint presentations, I am not so convinced of the evils of this package as Tufte is. Nevertheless, his design strictures against Autocontent Wizards, design templates, seemingly infinitely hierarchical bullet points make good sense. More about this in a later post.

So, in summary, I'm finding this an interesting read, but rather less informative in an instructional way than Visual Display. Not essential.