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I am really curious to know what you took from this book. I am really confused about why people like it so much. For example, do you like Tufte's box plot? D

• Silhouette 13y ago
  I read the book not long after it was first published and relatively early in my career. What I found useful was not the spartan presentation. I do a lot of custom UI and data visualisation work these days, but even my plainest designs don't tend to be as extreme as many of Tufte's examples. However, numerous projects I've worked on have been influenced by his underlying themes, like avoiding misleading presentation and unnecessary clutter, using graphics to convey patterns and relationships that wouldn't stand out from the raw data, and most of all how effective a customised or completely original presentation style can be depending on the nature of the data and what you're trying to illustrate. Maybe if I read the book for the first time today I'd regard a lot of the ideas as obvious or trivial, just as I don't need to read another article on different types of colour scheme or how to choose well-matched fonts any more. For on-line use, where we have tools like colour and animation and interaction readily available, I certainly do things very differently. However, a lot of the way I look at data visualisation and graphical illustration today was no doubt shaped by reading Tufte early on, and so I give him the credit I feel is due.