Beautiful Evidence

This is the third book of Tufte I read (check also Visual Explanations and Envisioning Information). My impression about BE is that’s a book which somewhat summarizes previous texts (also the chapter about PowerPoint is an old article recycled); in fact most significant examples of them are still reported here. The biggest innovations introduced are the chapter about the sparklines, a great tool which helps conducting quantitative analysises, and the one regarding depestalization, interesting but mostly unrelated with the rest of the book. In my opinion this is a very good book which can (at least partially) “replace” previous three ones, for this reason it will be most enjoyed by Tufte newbies while who already has them can save the money.

Visual Explanations

This is the second book of Tufte I read, the third book of the series divided  in numbers (“The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”), nouns (“Envisioning Information”) and verbs (“Visual Explanations”). VE is structured like all other books, many examples (both good and bad) are shown to support author’s ideas; simply enlightening are the case studies regarding the Cholera epidemic in London analyzed by John Snow and the decision to launch the Space Shuttle Challenger. Also interesting is the chapter about magic as an example of “disinformation design” and the principle of the “smallest effective difference”.

As the other books, VE is both pleasant and useful.

Envisioning Information

Trying to avoiding math/computer science books at least for a while, I’ve borrowed from the ultra furnished Georgia Tech Library “Envisioning Information” (Edward Tufte). This book, part of a trilogy, concerns the use of graphical language to represent information (this one in particular regards nouns, the other two are about numbers and verbs respectively).
I’ve found this reading very interesting and pleasing, the examples cited really convinced me for the need of an information representation design (i.e. the steam leaf plots for tram schedules and “1+1=3″ graphical effects). But the book itself it’s the better explanation for Tufte ideas, it’s really easy to read, images are always in the same page of text which are referred by, few pages (around 120) but dense of content. Two sentences from the book I’ve really liked are “Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information” and “God is in the details”.
From the notes of Galileo Galilei regarding sunspots to travel maps, from software interface design to math book (here you can find the simplest and most beautiful proof for Pythagorean theorem ever!), topics touched by this book are many but all important.
Definitively a must to be read (maybe “see” would be more correct!), suggested to everyone.