Envisioning information

by Wojciech Adam Koszek   ⋅   Aug 27, 2013   ⋅   Menlo Park, CA

If you're a UX/UI designer, this would be a must-have book. I found its look very appealing. Tufte created a great style for this book. But content I've found hard to digest. I get the concepts, but reading was a chore, since the nomenclature and the way he phrases things is very "liberal arts".


Edward Tufte’s books were on my TODO for 2 years now (I got the 4 pack from somebody who apparently participated in the tutorial), but haven’t had a chance to actually read them.

Pretty difficult to start from due to the artistic vocabulary and pretty dense language, I proceed with “Envisioning information” as the first book from the collection.

Pretty amazing research has been done to create a book of that type. Examples of the art forms comes from several centuries and spun many countries.

Presenting information is a very difficult subject, having learned it at a daily job. Needing to present 4 combination of experiments across 5 temperatures, 5 voltage levels of different types of units, I must say book is very inspirational.

With new technologies like WebGL and d3.js the knowledge gained will turn to be helpful each time bigger portion of the data has to be “compressed” from many dimensions to just 2.

Also thing this is emphasized, which I could say I didn’t really realize is the resolution of the print as compared to the resolution of modern displays. Paper still rules. The next visualization system I’ll have to design I’ll try to make around the concept of actually printing content, instead of just viewing interactively on the screen.

Really great for information designers, but also for any graphic designers. I’d also recommend it to website designers for anything that has to show complex datasets.


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About the author: I'm Wojciech Adam Koszek. I like software, business and design. Poland native. In Bay Area since 2010.   More about me