by Edward R. Tufte

About the Book

I think Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte is awesome and super popular for good reasons. People love it because it takes confusing piles of data and shows how to make them simple and pretty with smart design. I like how it says messes aren’t normal — they’re just bad design — which makes sense to anyone annoyed by hard-to-read stuff. The book’s cool because it’s full of clear ideas and nice words that stick with you and change how you see info.

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Quotes & Ideas

Chapter 1 • Escaping Flatland

Escaping Flatland is the essential task of envisioning information— for all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature.

What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be ‘boiled down’ and ‘simplified’? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.

Chapter 2 • Micro/Macro Readings

We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our marvelous and everyday capacities to select, edit, single out, structure, highlight, group, pair, merge, harmonize, synthesize, focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down, choose, categorize, catalog, classify, list, abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate, discriminate, distinguish, screen, pigeonhole, pick over, sort, integrate, blend, inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, average, approximate, cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flip through, browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, refine, enumerate, glean, synopsize, winnow the wheat from the chaff, and separate the sheep from the goats.

So much for the conventional, facile, and false equation: simpleness of data and design = clarity of reading. Simpleness is another aesthetic preference, not an information display strategy, not a guide to clarity.