I recently fin­ished reading Tufte’s “Visual Dis­play of Quan­ti­ta­tive Infor­ma­tion”. As the title sug­gests, the book is con­cerned pri­marily with the design of data graphics. How­ever, while reading the book I could not help but think of my first few design classes at Pratt. These foun­da­tional classes pro­vided a forum for exploring the basic prin­ci­ples of visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion and graphic design. The prin­ci­ples of graphic excel­lence for data dis­plays that Tufte pro­motes in his writing mirror or are anal­o­gous to the prin­ci­ples of gen­eral visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion. From this per­spec­tive, I found his book to be a won­derful reminder. There are so many things a designer must be aware of in the cre­ative process. It can be over­whelming. I think good graphic designers have prac­ticed enough to have made this aware­ness part of their nature. Alas, I still need to be reminded. Often.

In this book, Tufte presents three dis­tinct ideas which can be gen­er­al­ized for graphic design:

1. The prin­ci­ples of graphic excellence
2. The source of graph­ical integrity
3. A theory of (data) graphics

I’ve paraphrased/rewritten Tufte’s three ideas in a gen­er­al­ized form that is applic­able for all graphic design.

The prin­ci­ples of graph­ical excellence

Graph­ical excel­lence is the well-designed pre­sen­ta­tion of inter­esting infor­ma­tion – a matter of sub­stance and design. Graph­ical excel­lence com­mu­ni­cates ideas with clarity, pre­ci­sion, and effi­ciency. And graph­ical excel­lence requires telling the truth. (from page 51)

It is this last part that I find most com­pelling. There is a con­sis­tent and promi­nent moral com­po­nent to Tufte’s analysis of data graphics and his theory of data graphics. He is con­cerned with hon­esty and avoiding both lies and decep­tion. This is some­thing that designers don’t often think about (or don’t really need to think about) as we are so often not in con­trol of the con­tent. But as cre­ators of the media that com­mu­ni­cates to large audi­ences, it is, I think, good to remember that there is an eth­ical com­po­nent to our work.

The source of graph­ical integrity

Graph­ical com­pe­tence demands dif­ferent skills: sub­stan­tive and artistic. Sub­stan­tive exper­tise must par­tic­i­pate in the design of visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion if the integrity of the con­tent is to be pre­served and graph­ical sophis­ti­ca­tion is to be achieved. (from page 87)

Infor­ma­tion will be most effec­tively com­mu­ni­cated if the designer under­stands the con­tent or works closely with a sub­ject matter expert. If, as a designer, you do not under­stand the infor­ma­tion, how can you pos­sibly create a graphic design that com­mu­ni­cates that infor­ma­tion in an effec­tive way. It would be like giving an English-speaking designer text in tra­di­tional Chi­nese and asking that person to create a page layout with that con­tent. Designers need to work closely with their clients to under­stand the infor­ma­tion and create effec­tive and sophis­ti­cated graphic designs.

To be continued…