Notes on the presentation from a user experience design perspective. I attended the course December 2011 in San Francisco. It was informative, and fun as Tufte is an engaging and charming speaker.

1. Presenting Data &
Information
Course by Edward Tufte
Learnings
by Sharon Cardinal
December 2011

2. Who is Edward
Tufte?
Sculptor
Professor/Lecturer: Yale, Stanford
Princeton
Publisher
Consultant: NASA, Apple, NY Times,
IBM, Bloomberg, Consumer Reports
Presidential appointment: Recovery
Independent Advisory Panel

3. Use whatever it
takes to explain
something.
Differences
Casualty
Photos Graphs
Sentences
Mechanism
Contrasts
Tables Comparisons

4. Use supergraphics.
in presentations
High-resolution designs
Personal
Interactive
Pre-determined
Highly edited

5. Consumers are looking for sentences.
Tell a story with
straightforward
graphics.
Amateur typography
Clunky boxes
Cartoony arrows
Chartjunk

6. For your presentations:
Bring a three
dimensional object
into the room.

7. Zero out the
interface.
Scrollbars
Administrative debris
Menus
Keys or legends

8. Annotate. Nouns and verbs.
Use linking lines.
Receives clicks CTA Goes to
notification Product page
Customer

9. Use sparklines.
word-sized graphics
design-simple
data-words

10. Content drives the
display.
How do we understand_________?
How do I use visuals to explain_________?

11. link to
Always show your
sources.
Credibility Believe-ability
Reputation Integrity

12. Find successful
examples in the wild.
Don’t get it original, find something
good and copy it.

13. Use examples from
newspapers.
Sentences
Bullet points
Numbers
TV
Powerpoint

14. Scientific journal
Nature has best
data visualizations.

15. Evidence is evidence.
Purpose of info display is to assist
thinking.
The intellectual task is to make smart
comparisons.

16. There’s too much data.
Approximately right
is better than not
exactly wrong.
There is a redundancy of things
being measured and the frequency
of measuring.

17. Software is not integrated.
Too many modes of
production
This is contrary to the means of
the user.

18. The best design
can do no harm.