Edward Tufte at Intelligence Squared
Decided I was feeling well enough to go to a talk last night by Edward Tufte - God of information design. (like I was going to miss that...)
Needless to say it was fairly awesome.
Honestly if you ever design anything with data i.e. content i.e. anything - it's worth watching this long but incredibly thought-provoking man. He makes his insights just as relevant to web-pages and slides and art as to data-vis. or statistical analysis.
Here are my take-aways:
6 principles of evidence:
- Compare. Nothing is visible without contrast
- Causality & Mechanics. Aim to describe how or why it went from A to B as well as the fact of going from A to B.
- Use multidata sets - data works best when it is contextualised by other data sets - i.e. allows comparison & causality
- Tell a story - when the content becomes secondary to the form all is lost.
- Integrate - all is content - pictures and words only got separated at Gutenburg (necessarily by process). Humans will always try and integrate words and pictures.
- Be credible. Document every source.
More generally:
- Put it on the same page. Non-adjacent content is non-comparable (example ppt)
- Humans are good at deciphering. NYTimes homepage has 400 links and still gets 10m daily users
- Web sites which Pitch have the ethics of the marketplace not the validity of websites that inform.
- Put content over process. Don't just do/use what is easiest/you know/you're told to. Do what is right for the data,
- Don't cherry pick - data only has validity when it has integrity.
- Only drug-dealers and web designers call their customers users
If you're interested I found some proper, fleshed out notes here by Mia Ridge