Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

TUFTE, Edward R.

ISBN 10: 0961392126 / ISBN 13: 9780961392123

Published by Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT, 1997

About this Item

First edition. Hardcover. 156 pages. Interesting book with numerous color and black and white illustrations. A fine copy in a near fine dust jacket with a small spot to the front pane and with publisher information sheets laid in. Seller Inventory # 127735

Bibliographic Details

Title: Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, ...

Publisher: Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT

Publication Date: 1997

Binding: Hardcover

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Describes design strategies - the proper arrangement in space and time of images, words, and numbers - for presenting information about motion, process, mechanism, cause, and effect. Examines the logic of depicting quantitative evidence.

Review:

With Visual Explanations, Edward R. Tufte adds a third volume to his indispensable series on information display. The first, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which focuses on charts and graphs that display numerical information, virtually defined the field. The second, Envisioning Information, explores similar territory but with an emphasis on maps and cartography. Visual Explanations centers on dynamic data--information that changes over time. (Tufte has described the three books as being about, respectively, "pictures of numbers, pictures of nouns, and pictures of verbs.")

Like its predecessors, Visual Explanations is both intellectually stimulating and beautiful to behold. Tufte, a self-publisher, takes extraordinary pains with design and production. The book ranges through a variety of topics, including the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger (which could have been prevented, Tufte argues, by better information display on the part of the rocket's engineers), magic tricks, a cholera epidemic in 19th-century London, and the principle of using "the smallest effective difference" to display distinctions in data. Throughout, Tufte presents ideas with crystalline clarity and illustrates them in exquisitely rendered samples.