"Visual Explanations" (and other books) by Edward R. Tufte

These books by Edward R Tufte are about effective visual communication. If I had to some them up in a single phrase it would be:

"Kill the frills and get to the point!"

A brutal example would be those 3D pie charts many people seem to be in love with. Why use imitation 3D when the information is flat? 3D is a frill added to a flat 2D pie chart, probably used because, well, it is easy to do, and "looks good"! Which of the following pie charts look "sexier"?

And which one allows a better comparison between sectors?

The books sound very technical, but you don't have to be a scientist or financial analyst to get something out of them. The illustrations (and illustrations of Tufte's ideas) come from a wide range of sources, for example a double page spread from "Babar's Dream", a children's story book, and a quote from Salman Rushdie's "Haroun and the Sea of Stories".

There is also a "stream of stories" illustration of the development of pop-rock music:

So visual explanations can be interesting and informative, without the use of pointless frills such as data destroying 3D or baroque framing of simple ideas.

Tufte attacks what he calls "Chartjunk" as follows:

"The interior decoration of graphics generates a lot of ink which does not tell the viewer anything new. The purpose of the decoration varies - to make the graphic appear more scientific, to enliven the display, to give the designer an opportunity to exercise artistic skill. Regardless of the cause, it is all non-data-ink or redundant data-ink, and it is often chartjunk."

And here is a pretty grim example of that:

The books have illustrations on every single page, adding force to Tufte's arguments. There is true story about a near disaster in space, the Salyut 6 space flight in 1977, when one of the cosmonauts nearly floated off into space. The two cosmonauts did not admit to the error till three months after their return to earth. You'll have to buy "Visual Explanations" to find out why this is relevant!

By the way these books are not computer graphics books, there are some computer graphics, but as many of the images come from hundreds of years ago.

Here are the other two books in this series:

"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" and "Envisioning Information".

Be warned, these books are big and expensive, but if you are interested in visual communication you can't be without them.

And, just for the record, here is the man himself: