From: Michael Brady <jbrady-AT-email.unc.edu>
Date: 06 Sep 2006 12:41:33 UTC   (09:41:33 AM in author's locale)
To: "The Graphics List" <graphics-AT-lists.graphicslist.org>

On Sep 6, 2006, at 9:27 AM, Anabella Wewer wrote:

> So, Michael, do tell... which was better or more useful, in your
> opinion? I have never seen or read Nigel Holmes, other than
> obviously seeing his work.

After reading The Visual Display of Qualitative Information, I
thought Tufte's focus on clarity and getting rid of "chartjunk" was
very astute, but I thought his extremely minimalist solutions to some
charts were a tad to astringent and spare. I have come to the
conclusion after working with authors who want some of that
"chartjunk" (like horizontal lines through the bar chart to make it
easier to read values, or putting the numerical values above the
separate bars, etc.), that some of that stuff is necessary as a
redundant framing device for the reader to quickly grasp what's being
displayed ("Okay, I know this thing. It's a bar chart, so I'll read
it as such"--i.e., it's not a map or a floorplan). Moreover, computer
UI principles indicate that some redundancy is good and expected, so
that the same diagram can be comprehended for the same result by
different people with different modes of grasping the diagram.

Holmes's work, in contrast, uses those cutesy illustrations, but in
fairness to him, he doesn't actually distort the presentation by
incorrectly scaling little bales of cotton or trucks (as Tufte
admonishes against doing). But Holmes relies on what I regard as the
falsity of injecting the extraneous ingredient of "fun" into a graphic.

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Michael Brady
www.michaelbradydesign.com


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