Beautiful Evidence Paperback – May 30, 2006

I have the other three books by Tufte in this series, and my expectations (based on other reviews) was quite low. Luckily, for me, it was exactly what I wanted. Some of the materials from older books was included in this one (along with lots of new material), but they were treated in detail that was missing in the previous books.In more than one book, Tufte uses Charles Joseph Minard's multivariate data map depicting Napoleon's invasion of Russia. In this book, he uses it once again, but he does so in a chapter devoted to this single map. The chapter, The Fundamental Principles of Analytical Design, begins with a much larger view of the map that folds out into a double-sized page making the details more available. Further, it is translated into English for those of us who do not read French. In one respect, the translation illustrated how strong the graphic explanation was--the translation didn't add much to it. However, using detail from Minard's map, Tufte is able to illustrate the principles of analytic design--the chapter's topic.This book is not a fast-food takeout. You must be willing to (and want to) mull over the graphics and text. While Tufte's fussiness may bother some (along with pronouncements that "THIS IS SO!) I find his efforts worth the time...taken leisurely and with the expectation of both an intellectual and enjoyable outcome.Tufte's rant on PowerPoint is reproduced in a chapter, but let's face it; it's worth thinking about. (Tufte blames both the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle losses on poor communication between engineers and decision makers--PowerPoint gets the blame fully for Columbia.) Even better than Tufte's rant about the thinness of PP as far as a tool for clear communication is Microsoft's smug response suggesting that the misuse of PP is the problem, and Tufte doesn't know what he's talking about. (The responses to Tufte's article from Microsoft and its hired guns (or flying monkeys) are not reproduced in the book, but the amount of clamor caused by Tufte indicates he hit a nerve. Even Don Norman, who knows a thing or two about design came to Microsoft's defense is one of his most disingenuous articles to date.)The last chapter, Sculptural Pedestals, is not as bad as I feared. To be sure, it is an opportunity for Tufte to showcase his own sculptures, but he is able to provide enough analytical material to justify this somewhat irrelevant addition to the book

I agree with a lot of the helpful, critical reviews so far. For scientists and others who produce quantitative graphics, start with Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Beautiful Evidence is a worthwhile addition, but should be better focused to core theme of the book. Or take Tufte's seminar; all books are included in the seminar registration fee.Parts of the book are very much worthwhile. Parts rehash themes that Tufte has already written extensively on. More focus would have greatly improved this book. He who assails "chartjunk" and "PowerPoint Phluff" dares to waste our time with 20 pages of Sculptural Pedestals and Landscape Sculptures? Those closing chapters amount to nothing more than vanity press, and have little to do with evidence or quantitative information. There are enough artsy things sprinkled throughout the sculpture vanity chapters are entirely superfluous.The book offers examples of both really bad and really great displays of information, but sometimes Tufte's pet peeves border on useless. For example, page 114 offers a hilarious dissection of an introduction to a weather guide, but the impact is weakened because of Tufte's disdain for double spaces after periods. In the grand scheme of evaluating the quality of evidence, who cares if there are double spaces after periods?I loved the dissection and redrafting of the brain mass versus body mass graphic (pages 118-121). The end result is remeniscent of the excellent quantitative graphics so often found in National Geographic. Tufte interrupts the flow of that presentation to insert a couple completely unrelated graphics on viscosity and temperature, merely to emphasize the virtues of color.The chapter The Fundamental Principles of Analytical Design is a worthwhile read. It could even be an organizing theme of the book. One might expect those Principles to be laid out early on, and the remainder of the book building and expanding on them. One would be wrong. Instead, Fundamental Principles are smack dab in the middle, sandwiched between pictures of Wizard of Oz and back-yard sculptures.Excellent graphics and insights are trademarks of Tufte; but so are rambling, lack of focus, recycling material from prior books, and self indulgence.

Out of all of the great ideas that are in this book, I am going to concentrate on the ones that relate to "what can be done with high-resolution display devices," such as 1200 dpi printers. An increasing amount of contemporary design is done for low-resolution displays, such as television and computer monitors. If we get a 1200 dpi version of one of these designs, as is easily possible with an inexpensive laser printer, we are not getting much benefit from that increased resolution. A lot of the ideas in Beautiful Evidence can be used today with Web scripts that generate PDF files to be printed. The rest of the ideas will be waiting for designers 20 years from now when computer monitors finally catch up to paper.dea 1: Sparklines (there are examples on the author's Web site). Tufte points out that nothing stops the modern printer from including small graphs right in-line with text or tables and that these graphs make comparisons much easier. Baseball fans will enjoy Tufte's depiction of a baseball season, first for one team and then for all teams. Tufte argues convincingly that showing history in a "sparkline" reduces "recency bias, the persistent and widespread over-weighting of recent events in making decisions."Idea 2: Forcing people to write English sentences instead of PowerPoint bullets results in a lot more clarity, especially with respect to causality.Idea 3: If you're running a business, figure out how to pack a huge amount of information, including sparklines, onto a single 11×17″ sheet of paper and print it out on a laserprinter, then give it to decision makers. With that one sheet of paper, they will have as much information as 15 computer screenfuls or 300 PowerPoint slides.A thought-provoking book that will reward repeat scrutiny.

Tufte's book includes a range of beautiful examples of information visualisation, but also wanders off in places in a slightly self-indulgent way, and uses a lot of space to cover some of the examples (Tufte self-published the book, I believe, which might explain this).In the same way as "The Design of Everyday Things" causes you to look at door handles in a new light, you never look at a chart or diagram in quite the same way after reading one of Tufte's books; bad design will leap out at you once you've seen examples of good design.He also includes the obligatory powerpoint-bashing, but in good humour.

As the title suggest, this book is simply beautiful. A joy to read.

Es un libro divulgativo con contenidos proyectados hacia una filosofía de la imagen a partir de los usos y su forma de conceptualizar las ideas del mundo imagocéntrico que vivimos en la actualidad. Aunque se encuentra "fechado" es decir no es actual, si lo es su propuesta de análisis derivado de la comprensión del funcionamiento de las imágenes a través del modo de utilizarlas para comunicar con ellas.

Das Buch ist wunderschön gemacht. Natürlich liest man ein solches Buch nicht von vorne nach hinten, sondern bleibt an einzelnen Bildern und Erklärungen dazu hängen. Trotzdem ist für mich (noch) nicht so "evident", für wen genau das Buch gemacht ist.Wie für meinen Vor-Rezensenten war auch für mich das Powerpoint-Kapitel besonders erhellend, da es die heutige Praxis in großen Firmen leider nur zu gut beschreibt.Dieses Kapitel scheint es auch als eigenständige Publikation unter dem Titel "The Cognitive Style of Power Point" zu geben (siehe also auch dortige Rezensionen).Neben technischen Beispielen, z.B. aus der NASA, gibt es sehr viele Beispiele aus der Kunst(geschichte) - aber auch ganz andere. Amüsant - aber wahr und wiederum erhellend - fand ich persönlich z.B. das Kapitel zu Podesten von Kunstwerken und Skulpturen sowie "Entthronisierung" durch "vom-Sockel-stoßen". Auch Edward Tufte selbst ist u.a. Bildhauer und zeigt seine Werke im letzten Kapitel (mit und ohne Sockel).Man sieht an einer Kapitelüberschrift - die Kapitel sind im übrigen nicht durchnummeriert, was lernen wir daraus? - wie "The Cognitive Style of Power Point: Pitching Out Corrupts Within", dass der bildreiche pointierte englische Schreibstil nicht ganz einfach zu übersetzen ist. Trotzdem folgt man den Argumenten sehr gut, auch wenn z.B. die Muttersprache Deutsch ist.

Spannend und unterhaltsam, dennoch wissenschaftlich korrekt und fundiert