Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information, Graphics Press, 1990, [ISBN 0961392118]
An award-winning book (numerous design awards) full of beautifully rendered diagrams, charts and pictures that attempt to escape the "flatland" imposed by paper.
The author, Edward Tufte, explores various ways that information has been successfully communicated over history and explains what they have done correctly.
I keep going back to this book and The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information, whenever I think about the sad state of visual presentation in books and articles about computer software construction. How many diagrams and pictures, in the books on your bookshelf, stand out as good conveyors of ideas and information?
Notation Centric diagrams in many computer books restrict our visual language vocabulary greatly.
Perhaps a pattern emerges:
Illustrations Clarify Text.
Envisioning Information is on my Pattern Person Book List.
-- Todd Coram
I am at this moment struggling to produce an illustration for an article in Byte Magazine. The model is Minard's Napoleonic March, a masterful layered illustration with all these elements working at once:
geography, depicted as a map of Europe with an arrow showing path of the army
time, the same arrow, showing the march from month to month
attrition, a variation in the width of the arrow, showing troop attrition over time
temperature, month-by-month, during the retreat from Moscow
and there may be one or two other layers I forget. Tufte reproduces this in one of his books, and calls it the best statistical graphic ever drawn. It was done in 1885.
I would like to think that Tufte's techniques can be applied elegantly and effectively to technical illustration of concepts in networking, object-oriented programming, processor architecture, and the like.
I have yet to come close to succeeding. It's really hard.
-- Jon Udell
Jon has captured three of the six variables in 'geography' above: location in two dimensions and direction of movement. I most recently was reminded of this graphic from an announcement of Tufte's one day course that is scheduled to be given in Denver, CO, Bellevue, WA, and Portland, OR the week of June 17th. Some of my co-workers attended it the last time it was in town and thought highly of it but I have a conflict and can't go this time either. One can call 1-800-822-2454 for information.
That was June 17 1996. Tufte is putting together a 1997 tour, but few dates are available. The 1-800-822-2454 is still the number to call, but the best they can do at the moment is put you on their mailing list.
--Dave Smith (1/30/97)
I attended one of the 1995 seminars, and heartily recommend them. Tufte is a riveting and passionate speaker, and he does far more than read his slides (or his books). He brings great visual aids, including, at the seminar I attended, his 1570 edition of Euclid, originally owned, if I remember correctly, by Ben Jonson.
Once upon a time I had to replace a seal on my fridge. Not knowing anything about fridges, I looked in the yellow pages under Refrigerator Repair and found a few places. I decided I would ring some place I had heard of, let's call it Fridge World. I knew I had to quote my fridge model number, so I wrote that down and went to ring Fridge World. Then I noticed that another ad (for a Mr Feather) in the yellow pages had two diagrams of types of fridge seals, labelled type A and type B. I had a look at my fridge and it was a type A. I thought "that will make it easier for a dodo like me to explain to Fridge World what I need". But then I realised that if Mr Feather had the foresight to put the diagrams in his ad, then he deserved the business. So I never rang Fridge World after all.
What's important here is that Mr Feather's diagrams were maybe 1 inch by 2 inches, but they made a complete fridge nincompoop like me able to explain to him what I wanted - the other option might have been Mr Feather making a trip to see what I needed then a trip to install it, instead of just turning up with it ready-made. The pictures were so simple and so well-placed, so just-what-I-needed, and so different from every other fridge repair ad, that they were essentially revolutionary. I wish encountered such good ideas more often.
See original on c2.com 