If the statistics are boring, you’ve got the wrong numbers.
Beautiful Evidence is about the theory and practice of analytical design.
The best graphics are about the useful and important, about life and death, about the universe. Beautiful graphics do not traffic with the trivial.
Make all visual distinctions as subtle as possible, but still clear and effective.
The world is generally multivariate.
Good design is clear thinking made visible, bad design is stupidity made visible.
If you’re told what to look for, you can’t see anything else.
The leading edge in evidence presentation is in science; the leading edge in beauty is in high art.
Clutter is not a property of information. Clutter is a failure of design.
An open mind but not an empty head.
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.
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.
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.
The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks – ways of thinking analytically – are tied to nature’s laws.
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.
The idea of trying to create things that last-forever knowledge-has guided my work for a long time now.
In general, I think audiences are a lot smarter than people think. So, it’s not “know your audience”, it’s “respect your audience, and really know your content”.
I am certainly not an intellectual relativist, nor a moral relativist.
If you like overheads, you’ll love PowerPoint.