Visual Explanations Quotes

“The act of arranging information becomes an act of insight.”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

“Television-disease: thin substance, contempt for the audience and the content, short attention span, and over-produced styling.”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

“Accidental communalities in design can easily induce false groupings in the eyes of viewers, who are often busy searching for visual hints that help to boil down, organize, group, and otherwise make sense...”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

“By establishing a structure of rhythms and relationships, parallelism becomes the poetry of visual information.”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

“Songs are not merely singles--unique, one-time, de novo happenings--rather, music and music-makers share a pattern, a context, a history.”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

“Make all visual distinctions as subtle as possible... small differences allow more differences.”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

“Unlike evanescent projected images, permanent and portable paper has credibility.”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

“Readers of pictorial instructions often have to spend too much of their time coordinating small steps buried in large blocks of text with small steps buried in a long sequence of illustrations. It is all as heavy-handed as Euclid...”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

“Drawings sometimes have a useful abstracting, idealizing quality: a generic heart is depicted, not a particular or idiosyncratic heart.”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

“Why should we fail to be rigorous about evidence and its presentation just because the evidence is part of a public dialogue, or is meant for the news media?”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

“Displays of evidence implicitly but powerfully define the scope of the relevant.”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

“The point is to get it right, not to win the case, not to sweep under the rug all the assorted puzzles and inconsistencies.”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

“For centuries, the profound, central issue in depicting information has been how to represent three or more dimensions of data on the two-dimensional display surfaces of walls, stone, canvas, paper, and, recently, computer screens.”
― Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative