Edward Tufte Conference

ET, as friends call him, addressed the crowd of perhaps 400+ people. He had an air of confidence but a humble smile while shaking hands in the first two rows. Most of the attendees were older business men and women who most likely work in the Silicon valley. I felt a bit out of place sitting in my biz-cas ensemble among sardine packed rows. My collared shirt, that I ironed in my sterile hotel room, was itching my neck.  Behind me, a woman watched in slow mo as coffee covered her new books. I looked around and imagined what my life would be like if I fit into this crowd. The nine to fivers who work to invest in modest midsize homes while fretting over retirement. They came in groups of colleagues and chatted about deadlines and meetings. I should take Tufte’s lead, who by the way makes a boat load of money with these conferences, and become an absolute expert at something. I would hold a conference where tech savvy college grads, rejected from the apple store, set up power point slides while ditzy girls with penciled in eyebrows register the suckers, 300 bucks at a time.

Tufte has made quite a name for himself in the world of informational graphics and the presentation of data. At each break, a line of at least 20 waited eagerly to have one of the four included books signed in silver felt tip. I remained in my seat and pretended to do the assigned reading.  With registration, we were given a cute cardboard box of his books and an 11 by 17 handout in his signature Gil Sans font. The assigned reading was required before the official start time of 10am but I was just too hyped up to focus after that free Styrofoam Starbucks coffee.

I have been interested in Edward Tufte for about a year now. M. Price, my prof for exhibit design at UCLA extension, recommended Envisioning Information for an assignment. Seen here. With the student discount the conference was a pretty good deal, I got a lot out of it.

During the conference Tufte’s main point was that we can consume much more data than most people expect. Highly dense graphics that use multi-levels of information are much more engaging than the excessively designed bar charts and graphs included in Microsoft Office. In viewing a graph that is dense, each person will search for the content of interest, thus the designer releases the authoritarian need to lead people through the exploration process. This forced exploration is often referred to as the painfully tedious, “Slow Reveal.”  You know,  those slow power point presentations with paragraphs in bullet form. Instead, if a person searches through information to make personal associations, this data will most likely be more memorable. Each person must use their own cognitive style to scan the information.  Tufte says “ there is no such thing as information overload, there is only bad design. Reduce the clutter”

Simple rules to follow:

• Never put information in boxes

• Always annotate

• Use gray linking likes

• Reduce optical clutter by calming down thick lines (mind the figure ground activity by using light lines)

• Find a good font and stick with it : Gill Sans/ Trebuchet

• Develop a sense of what is relevant (become a good sorter because 95 % of published material is junk)

• No matter how beautiful your interface design is, there should be less of it

• Mind the Quality, Relevance and Integrity of the content

• Fundamental design principles and solutions should arise from cognitive tasks and content not from the trends of software