Quotes from Edward Tufte

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

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

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

Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.

My idea here is that, inasmuch as certain cognitive tasks and principles are tied to nature's laws, these tasks and principles are indifferent to language, culture, gender, or the particular mode of information that is provided.

That is to say, nature's laws are causal; they reveal themselves by comparison and difference, and they operate at every multivariate space, time point.

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.

There are many true statements about complex topics that are too long to fit on a PowerPoint slide.

If you like overheads, you'll love PowerPoint.

What this means is that we shouldn't abbreviate the truth but rather get a new method of presentation.

I hope that I am generous and tolerant, but certainly on the intellectual side I think that there are discoverable truths, and some things that are closer approximations to the truth than others.

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

A curious consequence is that I have become a minor celebrity.

What gets left out is the narrative between the bullets, which would tell us who's going to do what and how we're going to achieve the generic goals on the list.

I am certainly not an intellectual relativist, nor a moral relativist.

It is straightforward for me to be ethical, responsible, and kind-hearted because I have the resources to support that.

The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks - ways of thinking analytically - are tied to nature's laws.

I think it is important for software to avoiding imposing a cognitive style on workers and their work.

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

Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information.

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

Design isn't crafting a beautiful, textured button with breathtaking animation. It's figuring out if there's a way to get rid of the button altogether.

The essential test of design is how well it assists the understanding of the content, not how stylish it is.

Design cannot rescue failed content.