BigShinyThing

The legendary information design theorist (and advisor to the Obama administration) is in London to promote his latest tome, Beautiful Evidence. We were lucky enough to get tickets for his talk at the Royal Geographical Society (along with apparently most of London’s geek population – talk about preaching to the converted).

Others have already transcribed his talk much better than we could have done, so we’ll stick to a few salient points. [Note: this is *very* hacked down for pertinence to this blog, hence the links to fuller notes and the full presentation at the bottom of the post].

Tufte on design …

The essential test of design is how well it assists the understanding of the content, not how stylish it is. You must understand the meaning of the content to design it. ‘Content indifference’ is the result of teaching that only design matters … Content matters! It’s a shame we live in a world where that counts as an insight.

On presenting and presentations …

There are two things you need to get across in a presentation – what the story is and why the audience should believe you.

On web design …

91 percent of pixels on the screen should be information.

On data visualisation …

It’s not a surface, it’s a depth.

At the end of the talk, we plucked up the courage to ask the great man a question. Asked what he thought about the current vogue for artists interpreting data with animations and so on, Tufte said, ‘I think they can do exactly what they please … one reason it’s alright is they’re not making other claims about the content, just using it as a found object. … I’ll stick with Matisse.’

Note: Lucy Spence’s brilliant sketch notes of the talk are on flickr whilst Intelligence Squared – who hosted the event – have a pay-per-view stream.