Con­tin­uing with my review of Tufte’s “The Visual Dis­play of Quan­ti­ta­tive Infor­ma­tion”, I turn my atten­tion to an adapted theory of graphics. This part of Tufte’s thesis is deliv­ered in sev­eral parts.

Max­i­mize the amount of mean­ingful ink

This first rule in the theory of graphics is dif­fi­cult to directly adapt to graphic design. The idea here is that mean­ing­less graphic ele­ments should be min­i­mized or removed, clearing the visual field for “ink” that actu­ally con­veys infor­ma­tion. In gen­eral, designers must realize that every­thing in the visual field con­tributes to the mes­sage that is con­veyed by the com­po­si­tion. Designers, like cin­e­matog­ra­phers, must make smart choices about the items that appear in the visual field, adding or removing items to ensure that the mes­sage is not being dis­torted, mud­died, or incor­rectly con­veyed. Ide­ally, every ele­ment in the visual field con­tributes to the orig­inal con­cept or the spe­cific mes­sage. If there are ele­ments that do not, the designer must ask if they are nec­es­sary and remove or replace them if they are not.

Avoid graphic junk

Often, there is a desire to “dress up” infor­ma­tion. This kind of graphic excess gen­er­ally has nothing to do with the orig­inal visual con­cept or the sub­ject of the con­tent. It is simply an artistic con­ceit or an effort to make some­thing that is con­sid­ered visu­ally “boring” a little more inter­esting. Tufte’s theory indi­cates that, instead of making the con­tent more inter­esting, this kind of graphic junk dis­tracts from the con­tent. Ulti­mately, there is no sub­sti­tute for good con­tent, and bad con­tent will not be res­cued by super­fluous graphics. The best thing is to stick to the orig­inal con­cept and clearly com­mu­ni­cate the content.

Make graphic ele­ments per­form more than one function

Graphic ele­ments can be employed for mul­tiple uses in a visual com­po­si­tion. They can simul­ta­ne­ously con­tribute to the form of the com­po­si­tion and the com­mu­ni­ca­tion of the con­tent. When con­structing a com­po­si­tion, make the most of each graphic ele­ment. This approach improves the effi­ciency and effec­tive­ness of the design.

Max­i­mize the infor­ma­tion density

This is per­haps the most dif­fi­cult prin­ciple to gen­er­alize. You could simply trans­late this idea to “don’t waste space”, but the actual meaning is a bit more com­pli­cated. For data dis­plays, this idea makes sense. The most inter­esting data dis­plays deal with very large sets of data. Dis­plays of very small sets of data are not very inter­esting. In a way, the prin­ci­ples pro­vided above will lead to a max­imum of infor­ma­tion in the visual field.

In addi­tion to these prin­ci­ples, Tufte offers a number of tech­niques that can be used to build data graphics. These prin­ci­ples should be very familiar to designers and are easily gen­er­al­ized from his spe­cific con­cern about data graphics to the larger prac­tice of graphic design.

1. Chose an appro­priate format for you design. The appro­priate format will be informed by both your con­tent and your concept.
2. Inte­grate the con­tent with the visual elements
3. Con­struct your com­po­si­tion with a sense bal­ance and scale that fits your con­cept and content.
4. Make the infor­ma­tion acces­sible. In other words, effec­tively com­mu­ni­cate the content.
5. The tech­nical con­struc­tion of your design should be flawless
6. Avoid unnec­es­sary, dis­tracting graphic elements.

Occa­sion­ally, Tufte repeats him­self. I am cur­rently working through the second of my set of four Tufte books, “Beau­tiful Evi­dence”. Many of the ideas pre­sented in “Quan­ti­ta­tive Dis­plays” are echoed in this second book. How­ever, the rep­e­ti­tion – the reminder – is ben­e­fi­cial. These prin­ci­ples of design, par­tic­u­larly the design of infor­ma­tion and data, are crit­i­cally impor­tant. Designers help com­mu­ni­cate infor­ma­tion in a visual manner. While it is impor­tant for designers to have a talent for artistic manip­u­la­tion, that talent is inef­fec­tive if suc­cessful com­mu­ni­ca­tion is not achieved. Designers should not over­look this oblig­a­tion to the audi­ence and always remember that the work we do is a ser­vice for the audi­ence as much as it is a ser­vice for our­selves or our clients.