You'll love the first Tufte book you read. If this is your second or third, you'll feel like he is repeating himself. ( )

Another very readable, visual, and to-be-absorbed book by Tufte on how to make effective visual displays of information. ( )

This is a much better book than the first one, there's a lot more substance and less polemic. However, it's not very well written and his main points get lost in the long series of examples, so it takes some work to get that substance out of it. ( )

I began reading Tuft's graphic information series in an attempt to thwart and destroy the boring academic PowerPoint. For those not aware, academic and/or scholarly PowerPoints, particularly those used to present research at conferences, are really, really, really...really...bad. Scholars are enamored with data and try to cram as much of it onto one slide as possible, literally presenting their audience with chapters of words on one slide (that no audience member can read and still reasonably listen to the presenter), APA-formatted tables (that no audience member can read because the data is too small), and lines of equations (that no audience member can decipher, but I'm certain the scholar believes looks impressive). Academic PowerPoints are distracting at their best, baffling at their worst. Tuft's series gives easy to understand textual and visual explanations on how to achieve good visual data. I do not believe it is necessary for academicians and scholars to become graphic artists; however, I believe it is necessary to learn how to display data in a manner that gets to the point of research and research outcomes with the impact intended.

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Books in the series:

Tufts, E. R. (1990). Envisioning information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Tufts, E. R. (1997). Visual explanations: Images and quantities, evidence and narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Tufts, E. R. (2001). The visual display of quantitative information (2nd Ed.). Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ( )

Super interesting info on data presentation written in an obtuse and boring way... ( )