Tufte's first three books on information design each took on a different kind of data (in his words, 'numbers', 'nouns', and 'verbs', or 1-D statistical data, 2-D correlations and diagrams, and 3-D data and time series). In beautiful evidence, Tufte takes a step back and picks several case studies, some from his other books, some brand new, to take an in depth look at how the presentation design positively or negatively effects how information is conveyed. Most notable is his detailed takedown of Boeing and NASA's use of Power Point to convey complex engineering studies, obfuscating the dangers imposed by falling debris from the space shuttle fuel tank that lead to the destruction of Columbia upon re-entry. He examines how information presentations succeed, how they fail, and how they can be made better. It is a fitting prologue to the series. ( )

Nice treatment of powerpoint :-) and a good introduction to what might be called the "design of information". Covers the cognitive/intellectual and design based tools and methodologies for thinking clearly and creating and presenting valid knowledge. ( )

Beautiful Design is Edward Tufte's fourth book in a series discussing and analysing the visual presentation of data. According to the introduction, there is a fifth volume planned.

Beautiful Design is a really lovely and luxurious volume, copiously illustrated throughout. I read this book immediately after The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and unfortunately I have to say I was a little disappointed by the comparison. Minard's Grande Armee chart makes a reappearance, not once, not twice, but five times in this volume! This is within a nice chapter describing a set of principles of analytical design (there are six in all). As usual, Tufte can get a little didactic, but I found that, while I perhaps disagree with his stonger statements, he's always an entertaining read, exemplified by his deconstruction and explanation of Minard's graphics

The major contribution here is the sparkline, small graphics intended to be embedded in text and tables. In fact they are just the sort of thing we see in many genome mapping papers where considerable quantities of data need to be clearly communicated in summary fashion. Tufte's website hosts a forum with an interesting discussion of sparkline implementation.

Tufte devotes an entire chapter to the evils of PowerPoint. He absolutely HATES it! Entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, it is available as a separately published pamphlet. Now, while I agree one does sit through some desperately bad PowerPoint presentations, I am not so convinced of the evils of this package as Tufte is. Nevertheless, his design strictures against Autocontent Wizards, design templates, seemingly infinitely hierarchical bullet points make good sense. More about this in a later post.

So, in summary, I'm finding this an interesting read, but rather less informative in an instructional way than Visual Display. Not essential. ( )

A masterpiece of beautiful design, but content-wise this book feels a bit like a "Tufte's Greatest Hits" collection. The Powerpoint-hatin' and the appreciation of Minard's "Napoleon marches on Moscow" graphic, for instance, will seem familiar to readers of Tufte's other books. (That's not to say that there isn't a pleasant sort of comfort to encountering them again here.) Of the chapters that felt really fresh, the one on "sparklines" is key: it's the one that best showcases Tufte's endless willngness to fruitfully rethink the ways that we visualize data. ( )