Edward Tufte — The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

1983

Artists: Edward Tufte · Year: 1983 · Medium: Influential book on information-design principles — theoretical framework for data-visualization aesthetics · Substrate: Published book, 197 pages, with hundreds of historical and contemporary visualization examples · Place: Cheshire, Connecticut, USA · Institution: Self-published (Graphics Press); Yale University (faculty) Edward Tufte self-published The Visual Display of Quantitative Information in 1983 through his own Cheshire, Connecticut imprint — Graphics Press — because no commercial publisher would produce the book to his specifications. He wanted hand-set typography, the integration of graphics and text on the page in Minard-like density, and a clothbound production he personally supervised. The book appeared, at list price $40, and changed the field of data graphics permanently. The book's argument, distilled: most chart-making is an insult to the data. The default settings of business-graphics software — bars in primary colors, 3D pie slices, gratuitous tick marks, redundant axes, logos and watermarks — actively obscure the information they claim to display. Tufte introduced the term "chartjunk" for these. He introduced the "data-ink ratio" as a measurable quantity: the proportion of ink on the page that actually represents data, versus ink devoted to framing, shading, gridding, and decoration. He argued, with dozens of historical and contemporary examples, that you could produce better graphics by erasing most of what the default settings added. The book matters to this archive because it is the treatise that made visualization a design discipline. Before Tufte, data graphics were an afterthought in statistical textbooks. After Tufte, they were a field with a history — including Charles Joseph Minard, William Playfair, John Snow — and a set of principles that could be taught. Every subsequent data-visualization project in this archive (Legrady's Data Flow, Anadol's Unsupervised, Viegas and Wattenberg's History Flow and Many Eyes projects) is downstream of this book. Tufte self-published four more books — Envisioning Information (1990), Visual Explanations (1997), Beautiful Evidence (2006), Seeing with Fresh Eyes (2020) — each produced to the same personal specifications. They sold, collectively, over two million copies entirely through his own direct marketing, a success so unusual in the academic-publishing world that Harvard Business School wrote a case study on it. He is still alive, still publishing, and still insisting that the book be set in Monotype Bembo. Lore Tufte, a Yale political-science and statistics professor at the time, had mortgaged his Connecticut house to finance the first print run of the book, which he laid out himself on a drafting table with rub-down Letraset headers. The total production cost was roughly $90,000. His wife Inge Druckrey, a graphic designer, helped with the typography. The book sold out its first printing within months and has never gone out of print. Tufte would later say, about the self-publishing decision, that he simply could not stand what trade publishers would do to his images with their production-cost-saving compromises, and that the only way to make the book he wanted to read was to print it himself. He keeps a working farm in Connecticut where he sculpts large-scale steel works, a practice he began in the 1990s as an outgrowth of his interest in the physical display of information. Sources • Tufte, Edward R. — The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Graphics Press, 1983; 2nd ed. 2001). • Harvard Business School — "Edward Tufte: The Da Vinci of Data" (case study, 2011). • Graphics Press — publishing catalogue.