The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
I read two Tufte books back to back and this is the one I read second. It’s a book about, you guessed it, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Feel those upper case letters of importance. This are serious book. Yeah, it’s about that dry. Which is not to understand its importance. For people who need to persuade with numbers and pictures, this is The Book to have read. But actually reading it? It’s kind of boring.
I want to contrast this strongly with the other Tufte book, which I’ll talk about later.
This particular book was weighty and meaty and covered a lot of territory and buried a lot of good points in here but holding them all in my head was an ordeal. I think this is the book you put on your work bookshelf or home coffee table to let people know that, hey, you know why PowerPoint sucks and, yeah, range frames are the bomb. It’s like the Mason sign or the Oddfellow’s shake or the Turtles passphrase.
So a good book to own, a good book to have, in the past, read. Will you re-read it? Probably not. You might not even finish it the first time if you have, oh, a television. Or a spouse. Maybe a really cold beer.
Who might like this book
- UI designers
- graphics wonks
- number nerds
Who might not
- people prone to innumeracy
- tactile thinkers
- the lowbrow crowd
