Quotes from Edward Tufte

The point of the essay is to change things.

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.

Good design is clear thinking made visible, bad design is stupidity made visible

Great design is not democratic; it comes from great designers. If the standard is lousy, then develop another standard.

If your words aren't truthful, the finest optically letter-spaced typography won't help.

In general, I think audiences are a lot smarter than people think. So, it's not "know your audience", it's "respect your audience, and really know your content".

The leading edge in evidence presentation is in science; the leading edge in beauty is in high art.

The best graphics are about the useful and important, about life and death, about the universe. Beautiful graphics do not traffic with the trivial.

My father worked for governments all his life as an engineer and public works director.

Public discussions are part of what it takes to make changes in the trillions of graphics published each year.

Beautiful Evidence is about the theory and practice of analytical design.

I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound - indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks.

The idea of trying to create things that last - forever knowledge - has guided my work for a long time now.

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

The leading edge in evidence presentation is in science the leading edge in beauty is in high art.

If you like overheads, you'll love PowerPoint.

The minimum we should hope for with any display technology is that it should do no harm.

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users.

If the statistics are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers.

Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.

I have stared long enough at the glowing flat rectangles of computer screens. Let us give more time for doing things in the real world . . . plant a plant, walk the dogs, read a real book, go to the opera.

Cosmetic decoration, which frequently distorts the data, will never salvage an underlying lack of content.

Comparisons must be enforced within the scope of the eyespan, a fundamental point occasionally forgotten in practice.

We shouldn't abbreviate the truth but rather get a new method of presentation.