All 5 books, Edward Tufte paperback $180
All 5 clothbound books, autographed by ET $280
Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Envisioning Information
Visual Explanations
Beautiful Evidence
Seeing With Fresh Eyes
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Edward Tufte e-books Immediate download to any computer: Visual and Statistical Thinking $5
The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint $5
Seeing Around + Feynman Diagrams $5
Data Analysis for Politics and Policy $9
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New ET Book
Seeing with Fresh Eyes:
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Meaning, Space, Data, Truth |
Analyzing/Presenting Data/Information All 5 books + 4-hour ET online video course, keyed to the 5 books. |
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In general, perimeter lines cause the eye to homogenize within the contained area, and to separate and differentiate that area from the surrounding external space. A big optical consequence for a very thin line.
Line and tone drawings exemplify the often wonderful interplay between outline and delicate color-wash tones.
Here Galileo reports his discovery of craters on the moon, with the moon's outline drawn with a compass:
Viewers standing inside the 3 legs of Twig 5, a large steel and air artwork,
come eventually to see a faint transparent surface, an airy triangle outlined
by 2 legs and the ground. Viewers can happily regard this apparent surface as the
surface of the pyramidal volume of air contained and held by the artwork itself.
For architects and sculptors, air is a material. Airspace is not the absence of material,
air is not "negative space." Airshapes are created, shaped, and formed by nearby
structural materials--steel, concrete, wood, glass. And so Twig 5 is made
from steel and air, by volume ~0.1% steel and ~99.9% air. By weight, the reverse.
Neil Dawson Horizons 1994 15 x 10 x 36m at the amazing Gibbs Farm in New Zealand.
In many arrays of images, the individual images are frames with gaps between images.
[ ET to fill in ]
[ ET to fill in ]
[ ET to fill in ]
[ ET to fill in ]
Areas surrounding data-lines may generate unintentional optical
clutter. Strong frames produce melodramatic but content-diminishing
visual effects. At left, the dominant visual elements are, of all things,
the strong stripes of the negative spaces between the heavy frames:
A good way to assess a display for unintentional optical clutter is to ask
"Do the prominent visual effects convey relevant content?" In the
exhibits above earning the unfortunate X, the most prominent visual
effect is usually the clutter produced by activated negative space.
Google Images (2 examples)
31% frame |
32% frame |
Apple iPhone (3 example, including horizontal)
Left: 33% frame Right: 24%
London Portrait Gallery (gold frames)
46% frame
Frame math paragraph |
Klee quilt with winking smiley frame
27% frame |
0% frame |
Klee quilt
0% frame
These 3 representations of a stone artwork illustrate the distinctions between stone, air, and intersection between stone and air. Look hard at each, and compare the three:
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Line and tone drawing by Wendy MacNaughton, of a detail from Lacy Wall (stone and air, 2013) by Dan Snow and Edward Tufte.
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-- Edward Tufte