Beautiful Evidence
by Edward R. Tufte · first published 2006
35% recommend61% neutral4% critical
Why HN recommends it
Praised for sound thinking about presenting data and evidence clearly, and called a core reference in information visualization. Recommended to designers, UI reviewers, and anyone who makes charts or dashboards.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates visual information. Beautiful Evidence is about how seeing turns into showing, how data and evidence turn into explanation. The book identifies excellent and effective methods for showing nearly every kind of information, suggests many new designs (including sparklines), and provides analytical tools for assessing the credibility of evidence presentations (which are seen from both sides: how to produce and how to consume presentations). For alert consumers of presentations, there are chapters on diagnos
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Check out Edward Tufte's books , from his webpage "Edward Tufte has written seven books, including Beautiful Evidence, Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Data Analysis for Politics and Policy. He writes, designs, and self-publishes his books on analytical…
on “Good books on UI/UX design?” ↗Dude Adrian this website's the shit. Yo, and if you're looking for really cool ways of presenting data, look up this guy http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Evidence-Edward-R-Tufte/dp/0...
on “Show HN: s0rce - A New Approach to News” ↗…Bringhurst Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward R. Tufte Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte Small Is Beautiful by E. F. Schumache The Art of Color by Johannes Itten Were I to teach a course, that would be the list of text books required (so you would own them after). First…
on “Required Reading for Product Designers” ↗If you like this type of thing, you should probably take a look at Tufte's book ‘Beautiful Evidence’. It contains these images too, along with a whole lot of opinions.
on “Poster: Napoleon's March” ↗There is lies and there is statistics :). For more reading on the subject, I recommend Beautiful Evidence by E. Tufte. He's a classic when it comes to infoviz.
on “Misleading charts of 2015, fixed” ↗…bible-ish if you ask me Another set of books I consider to be "one" bible are Edward Tufte's (1) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, (2) Envisioning Information, (3) Visual Explanations and (4) Beautiful Evidence.
on “Ask HN: What book is considered the bible of your field/industry?” ↗You might want to read Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence.[1] He discusses stuff like what you brought up about readability and distracting from the message / point of the data. If you've seen sparklines, [2] Tufte coined the term. Whenever I do a UI review…
on “The design philosophy of Great Tables” ↗…Quantitative Information" https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Informati... [1] "Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0961392126 [2] "Beautiful Evidence" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0961392177 [3] "Envisioning Information" https://www.amazon.com/Envisioning-Information-Edward-R-Tuft...
on “A hexagonal-tiled cartogram for U.S. counties” ↗Sparklines are good. The Book the text came from is better. The three previous books and "Beautiful Evidence" stand next to Knuth in my estimation. For Perl fans out there check out CD-Graph-Sparklines on CPAN.
on “Sparklines: theory and practice” ↗Tufte debunked this book in Beautiful Evidence. It even led him to coin the term economisting (emphasis on con and mist). Draft: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... When I first read it I remarked that he was going after…
on “Old Masters and Young Geniuses” ↗…The Baroque Cycle, which this is the second volume of, has been very educational and always entertaining) The Visual Display of Quantative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence (I picked up all four books by Edward Tufte at his one day training course. At the 2011 SVG Open, I was blown away by Mike Bostock's D3 demo, and Niel Fraser told me to read all of Tuftes books to see…
on “Ask HN: What are you reading? What've you read lately?” ↗…Microsoft names Tufte as the inventor on the posted page. "For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”, as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence. "
on “Sparklines in Excel” ↗"Given that you have a published book with a clear description of the subject matter, it is a very strong case." Does he actually have a description of the subject matter? I haven't read Beautiful Evidence, but Tufte's descriptions of sparklines that I've read don't say anything about auto-generating sparklines in electronic documents based on data in the document, which is what is claimed in the patent.…
on “Microsoft makes patent claim for sparklines” ↗…explosions: PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... Tufte's textbooklet on powerpoint (an excerpt from his book Beautiful Evidence): The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint
on “Why PowerPoint should be banned” ↗> Edward Tufte's. Beautiful diagrams Did you mean _Beautiful Evidence_? I also think diagram skills are impressive but almost every time I try to get my understanding into a single page diagram I just gets lost along the way and the resulting diagram lacks just One Thing…
on “An old hacker's tips on staying employed” ↗