Edward Tufte Quotes

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

The idea of trying to create things that last - forever knowledge - has guided my work for a long time now.

A curious consequence is that I have become a minor celebrity.

Design isn't crafting a beautiful, textured button with breathtaking animation. It's figuring out if there's a way to get rid of the button altogether.

If your words aren't truthful, the finest optically letter-spaced typography won't help,

What this means is that we shouldn't abbreviate the truth but rather get a new method of presentation.

A metaphor for good information design is a map. Hold any diagram against a map and see how it compares.

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.

Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information.

My father worked for governments all his life as an engineer and public works director.

The essential test of design is how well it assists the understanding of the content, not how stylish it is.

I was writing a chapter of Beautiful Evidence on the subject of the sculptural pedestal, which led to my thinking about what's up on the pedestal - the great leader.

Clutter is not a property of information. Clutter is a failure of design.

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.

The idea is that the content is the interface, the information is the interface, not computer-administrative debris.

The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks - ways of thinking analytically - are tied to nature's laws.

The best graphics are about the useful and important, about life and death, about the universe. Beautiful graphics do not traffic with the trivial.

I am certainly not an intellectual relativist, nor a moral relativist.

I think it is important for software to avoiding imposing a cognitive style on workers and their work.

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".

The point of the essay is to change things.

The world is generally multivariate

If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant.

My idea here is that, inasmuch as certain cognitive tasks and principles are tied to nature's laws, these tasks and principles are indifferent to language, culture, gender, or the particular mode of information that is provided.

If you're told what to look for, you can't see anything else.

Great design is not democratic; it comes from great designers. If the standard is lousy, then develop another standard.

The most common user action on a Web site is to flee.

Here's the general theory: To clarify, add detail. Imagine that. To clarify, add detail. And clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information, instead fix the design.

The minimum we should hope for with any display technology is that it should do no harm.

The goal is to provide analytical tools that will last students a lifetime.

It is straightforward for me to be ethical, responsible, and kind-hearted because I have the resources to support that.

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.

Public discussions are part of what it takes to make changes in the trillions of graphics published each year.

What is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and the difficult - that is, revelation of the complex.

A practical part of my teaching is to provide demonstrative, hands-on experiences.

An open mind but not an empty head.

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'.