Edward Tufte is my American Idol
I met my real-life American Idol yesterday–and I even snagged his autograph!
Ok, so Edward Tufte autographs his books for everyone who attends his awesome “Presenting Data and Information” course, but that’s besides the point. And the $380 course fee may sound expensive for a 6-hour seminar, but I think it’s actually a tremendous bargain. In addition to the privilege of hearing Edward Tufte in person, everyone who attends the course also receives four books.
Each book normally costs $50 or so, although you can get the full set for $160 from edwardtufte.com.
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
- Envisioning Information
- Visual Explanations
- Beautiful Evidence
I first discovered these books in 2002. By chance, I came across Envisioning Information at the Montclair Barnes & Noble bookstore. And as soon as I started reading the first couple pages, I was immediately hooked. Smitten might be a better word. I remember that night, just deciding to take the plunge (damn the torpedoes!) and ordering the three books off of Amazon.com, even though it cost what-was-then-a-staggering $150. (The fourth book, Beautiful Evidence, wasn’t published until 2006). And when they finally arrived, I devoured them. Pored over every sidenote. Studied every single diagram. Pondered every single one of Tufte’s design principles. I know this may sound strange, but it wouldn’t be hyperbole to describe those next two weeks as bliss.
Over the years, I’ve fully re-read each book at least twice, and still enjoy scanning them for inspiration. I still regard them as one of my smartest purchases ever.
Tufte writes, designs, and publishes these books himself, and the production quality is top-notch. The 3-D popup pyramid on page 16 of Envisioning Information demonstrates the same visualization technique used in the 1570 edition of Euclid’s Elements. Guess how much it costs to include this pop-up pyramid in every book? Tufte told us, it’s an extra 32 cents per printing. Passion doesn’t always come cheap.
Now, if you:
- are an information architect
- want to be a graphic designer
- study financial charts
- deal with information presentation in any way (and in today’s world, who doesn’t?)
then do yourself a favor and buy the full set today. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just check out the reviews on Amazon (“Best 100 books of the 20th century.”) or Tufte’s site (“If this book were a house, it would have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright”). The high praise is deserved.
These books form the foundation of my visual design thinking. I respect the Tufte’s depth of his wisdom and his clear way of thinking. I love that his integrated design principles are ethical and respectful of the viewers’ intelligence. In future blog posts, I’ll cover how I try to apply them as part of the Kinetic experiment.
As if I haven’t gushed enough, I’ll close out this post with yet another reason why I respect Edward Tufte so fully:
But he is no stranger to iffy new enterprises. Tufte, who taught at Princeton from 1967 to 1977 and Yale from 1977 to 1999, entered publishing in 1982, when an Ivy League university press agreed to publish his first book, then told him that someone else would design it and that the book would sell for more than $64. Tufte had other ideas. He wanted control of the design, and a lower price.
Tufte enlisted the help of a seasoned book designer and self-published “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” — and priced it at $32. A second mortgage on his house paid for the venture, even though the best interest rate he could get was 18.7% — a particular horror for a trained statistician, but the strongest possible incentive to market fiercely.