A nice profile on Edward Tufte.

Edward Tufte occupies a revered and solitary place in the world of graphic design. Over the last three decades, he has become a kind of oracle in the growing field of data visualization—the practice of taking the sprawling, messy universe of information that makes up the quantitative backbone of everyday life and turning it into an understandable story.

Edward Tufte will be joining President Obama’s staff and will be bringing his infographic expertise to the mix. This is exciting news as I believe we’ll better (visually) understand some of the data we constantly hear from the White House. Combine this with how well designed Obama’s campaign was and we’re beginning to see how important branding and design are.

As I mentioned awhile back I attended the Presenting Data and Information Seminar by Edward Tufte. I’m currently going through an exercise where I’m trying to best present information, so I thought it’d be a good time to revisit (and type up) my notes.

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A couple year’s ago I attended Edward Tufte’s class Presenting Data and Information seminar (highly recommended). His seminar was very eye-opening and since then I’ve been quite a fanboy. I try to incorporate his methods in everything I do. I was pleased to find these copious notes on Tufte’s class. I took some notes and have spent some time highlighting passages from his four books that I’ll document at some point here. Also worth checking out is his essay on PowerPoint.

Anyone who spends a lot of time creating “scorecards”, “dashboards”, “metrics” and such in Excel, should really be using TinyGraphs, a free sparkline (term coined by Edward Tufte) generator. For those of you who have a bit of a budget, try SparkCode Professional.

I understand that PowerPoint is a necessary evil, but I loathe the bullet-point heavy presentations most people put out there. (Hint, go check out Presentation Zen to change that). Edward Tufte (infographics rockstar!), who also loathes PowerPoint, notes that Microsoft is steering away from using its own product.