Edward Tufte Quotes (35 Quotes)


    The key argument is that cognitive tasks should be turned into design principles.

    If you like overheads, you'll love PowerPoint.

    The point of the essay is to change things.

    In emphasizing evidential quality and beauty, I also want to move the practices of analytical design far away from the practices of propaganda, marketing, graphic design, and commercial art.

    Second, simply use PowerPoint as a slide projector rather than an information tool.


    The know-your-audience philosophy can be a big step down the road to pandering to the audience.

    There are many true statements about complex topics that are too long to fit on a PowerPoint slide.

    Public discussions are part of what it takes to make changes in the trillions of graphics published each year.

    The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

    It is straightforward for me to be ethical, responsible, and kind-hearted because I have the resources to support that.

    Beautiful Evidence is about the theory and practice of analytical design.

    Along with thirty-two years of being a professor at Princeton and Yale, I also greatly enjoy teaching out on the road.

    Beautiful Evidence follows a growing concern in my work assessing the quality of evidence and of finding out the truth.

    The minimum we should hope for with any display technology is that it should do no harm.

    My father worked for governments all his life as an engineer and public works director.

    The idea of trying to create things that last - forever knowledge - has guided my work for a long time now.

    What this means is that we shouldn't abbreviate the truth but rather get a new method of presentation.

    Rather, the point is to recognize the tightness between seeing and thinking on an intellectual level not just a metaphorical level.

    I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound - indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks.

    That is to say, nature's laws are causal; they reveal themselves by comparison and difference, and they operate at every multivariate space/time point.

    A practical part of my teaching is to provide demonstrative, hands-on experiences.

    The goal is to provide analytical tools that will last students a lifetime.

    What gets left out is the narrative between the bullets, which would tell us who's going to do what and how we're going to achieve the generic goals on the list.

    I was writing a chapter of Beautiful Evidence on the subject of the sculptural pedestal, which led to my thinking about what's up on the pedestal - the great leader.

    I hope that I am generous and tolerant, but certainly on the intellectual side I think that there are discoverable truths, and some things that are closer approximations to the truth than others.

    I am certainly not an intellectual relativist, nor a moral relativist.

    At its heart, my work is about how to think clearly and deeply, using evidence, and all that has to pass through some presentation state.

    I think it is important for software to avoiding imposing a cognitive style on workers and their work.

    It's not that PowerPoint brought the Columbia down, but the method of presentation broke up the argument into tiny fragments, and it's intensely hierarchical-no sentences, just little phrases.

    The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks - ways of thinking analytically - are tied to nature's laws.

    My idea here is that, inasmuch as certain cognitive tasks and principles are tied to nature's laws, these tasks and principles are indifferent to language, culture, gender, or the particular mode of information that is provided.

    We've drifted into this presentation mode without realizing the cost to the content and the audience in the process.

    The leading edge in evidence presentation is in science; the leading edge in beauty is in high art.

    The central claim of the book is that effective analytic designs entail turning thinking principles into seeing principles.

    A curious consequence is that I have become a minor celebrity.


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