Sublime

Tufte created an enduring theory of information design in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983)

If Brinton is modern data visualization’s first apostle, and Spear and Bertin its early disciples, Edward Tufte is its current pope.

BRINTON TO BERTIN TO TUKEY TO TUFTE

He discovered that because PowerPoint slides are low resolution and designed to be projected on a wall and read at a distance, the tool encourages people to be overly reductive. As a point of comparison, he looked at the gold standard of everyday charts—the data-rich ones you’d see in newspapers like The New York Times. Tufte found that the average

Data are records of observations.

To offset the deeply technical learning he was doing with the stats software, he sought out less taxing, more-popular writing: Freakonomics, The Undercover Economist. Eventually, he found Edward Tufte. “I hadn’t been excited about visualization before that,” he says. “The stats packages didn’t do visualization very well, so I never thought about it