Tufte: information design’s magical curator

Review by David Sless

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities: Evidence and Narrative. by Edward R. Tufte, Dmitry Krasny (Illustrator) Hardcover—156 pages (March 1997) Graphics Press, ISBN 0961392126

Edward Tufte is the magical curator of information design. Following in the grand tradition of 19th century museum curators, his books are masterpieces of the exhibitor’s art. The exhibits are extracted from their daily contexts of use and beautifully displayed with his engaging and fascinating commentary. Tufte has given us another wonderful show and continues to stimulate a wide public interest in the information designers’ craft and achievement.

The great appeal of his exhibition is that you do not have to go to the museum to see it, it comes to you. You can own your own exact reproduction of this collection—touch it and take in its visual delights from the comfort of your own armchair. This is both the great success of his exhibition and, ultimately, its limitation. You can enjoy its splendour, but you cannot see how the information artefacts he shows actually work for people in their context of use. Nor does his exhibition teach you how to do what Tufte does, any more than looking at a beautifully stuffed animal in a display case will teach you how to be a taxidermist, zoologist, or ecologist.

Craft

To understand something of the depth of Tufte’s craft you need to know that he not only writes, illustrates, and publishes his own books, he also manages their printing.

As a self publisher, Tufte exercises complete control over his work—text, illustrations, layout, and ?final production. In today’s world of desktop publishing this is hardly a novelty. But Tufte is not using desktop technology. He is using high end print technology which separates out the various crafts of book-making and deals with these in a linear production process that starts with an author, goes through an editor, illustrator, designer, compositor, film and plate maker, and ends with a printer and distributor. To have mastered such diverse crafts, and integrated them in such a splendid way is a unique achievement.

It is, however, a paradoxical achievement. Information design is a practical craft: it is about making information accessible and usable. Yet Tufte gives us a book about information design which tells us nothing explicitly about the making of this book. We are presented with examples, the quality of which, most information designers would be unable to reproduce in their own work.

Tufte spares no expense in getting the best from current technology—a luxury of time and economy which is seldom offered to today’s information designers who are invariably working to tight time lines with restricted budgets. It is the top quality paper and the extremely sharp, detailed and clean printing that gives such a sense of quality to the pages of his book and makes reading them and looking at the illustrations so delightful.

Contrast the control a self publisher has over all stages of the production process and budget with information designers working to real world constraints and you can see why Tufte’s books stand out from the crowd.

Magic

Tufte is a showman—a magician. He puts on a performance and we applaud it. What we applaud is Tufte himself, rather than the information design he presents us with. Just as when we applaud a magician’s act, it is the magician we applaud, not his brightly coloured props.

How does his magic work? I have taken a single page—page 74—of his latest book to illustrate how his performances work.

The design of this page, like the rest of the book, follows the conventional grid structure in which text and illustrations are harmoniously arranged on a page to provide a formally elegant spacing of elements. The grid is based on a series of repeated rectangular shapes and sizes and derives from the pre photographic era in which metal plates and lettering were arranged in rectangular blocks in frames.

As an interesting aside it is worth noting that this grid method of structuring pages has been much admired and used for its formalist aesthetics, but its usefulness in information design is not self evident. Indeed if one takes Tufte’s page and plots the sequence of movements that readers have to make to follow his argument closely, then a conflict between structure and simple usability becomes apparent.

The numbers and lines show the movements that a reader has to make to navigate through the page’s text and illustrations in order to follow Tufte’s arguments closely. But Tufte is concerned with the overall magical effect which, if anything, draws they eye away from the significant telltale movements in the dramatic performance of a trick

Tufte’s magic is to make his arguments self evident truths, embodied in beautiful illustrations. He achieves this effect by beginning his arguments with an explanation of the design principle that he is going to then illustrate. This is a powerful framing technique which prepares the reader to look at the illustration in a particular way.

In the diagram below, the portion of the page in red is wholly devoted to explaining the principle he is then going to illustrate.

The red part of the text is concerned with telling his audience how to apply a particular design principle to illustrations, thus guiding the audience and preparing them to read the grey areas of text and the illustrations in a particular way.

In this framing text in the first paragraph he introduces ‘[t]he idea of the smallest effective difference’. Given this idea you are then able to go on and follow the descriptions of the illustrations on the second half of the page.

It is perhaps ironic that Tufte regards many of the design ‘principles’ he frames in this way as universal ideas, applicable to all illustrations in all media. If this were so then presumably the principles would already be obvious to any audience and thus require no explanation!

But Tufte, a master performer, leaves nothing to chance. He frames illustrations with ‘instructions’ on how the illustrations are to be viewed, leaving no uncertainty for the audience. Thus primed, the audience then ‘looks’ at the illustrations and behold: the evidence for the truth of Tufte’s argument is there before their eyes! Great magic, and one is left with the conviction that the illustrations ‘work’ just as Tufte told us they would.

One of the great joys of Tufte’s performance is that it seems to provide certainties in an uncertain world.

It is only when we put down his book, leave the magical display and performance behind us, as it were, that the uncertainty of the world reasserts itself. All those awkward practical questions that researchers and information designers have asked re-emerge about what may or may not work in practice. None the less, for a brief moment we can suspend disbelief and enjoy certainty, believing that all we have to do to make information design work is to follow Tufte’s masterful magical guidance.

Out in the world that most of us work in—with low resolution media, practical compromises, and the ever inventive public using our designs without the benefits of prior framing—information design is not so simple.

There is no curator’s caption to tell people how to read the perfectly presented image behind the glass case. Indeed there is no glass case, just the mundane world of hurriedly prepared timetables, maps, charts and diagrams that we all struggle with.

There is, of course, an important role in our life for the 19th century museum—the place we go to to get out of the rain and quietly contemplate human ingenuity and craft. But we would be doing both the museum and the outside world a disservice if we believed that what ‘works’ well as an exhibit would also work well on the street outside.