Visual Explanations

What Hacker News says

1. atrettelMay 2025
   Thank you. You raise an interesting point that I had not considered before. Norman does talk about how good design just works intuitively without users needing to be told how use something (especially in regards to door knobs and light switches as examples if I recall correctly!).

   That said, intuition is heavily influenced by existing practices and culture. My understanding is that Tufte wrote his first book as a reaction to existing practices and hence the notion was that what was considered intuitive was different than what we both imagine and also suboptimal.

   There is a book called Graphis Diagrams released a few years before Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information that compiled what people previously considered "good" data visualizations pre-Tufte. I'd call Graphis Diagrams more of a collection of art pieces than a collection of good data visualizations, but that was the field before Tufte's work. Some of the visualizations are interesting, but many seem incredibly dated and make heavy use of "chartjunk" (Tufte's term). I'd argue that we wouldn't consider those supposed "good" examples very readable and useful by modern standards, and that just goes to show that intuition can change (for better or for worse).

   I do also agree that Tufte tends towards a certain kind of performative minimalism that seems excessive at times to me. Often times the better solution is to present the data in a different way --- transform it using mathematics, use a different visualization, or something else --- rather than just reduce the amount of ink you are using. Box plots and pie charts are just useless to me as media since they simply cannot account for complexity, and no amount of minimalism is going to solve that. The answer is to use another kind of visualization (or perhaps use parallelism/small multiples to build up those kind of simple visualizations into something more meaningful).

   I personally find Tufte's book Visual Explanations to be his best book. It focuses much more on how good visualizations can help you explore data more readily (see what otherwise could not be seen), especially in regards to cause and effect. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is certainly more famous but it focuses on much more low-level implementation details like the "data-ink ratio", etc. and not bigger picture things, in my opinion. I recommend giving Visual Explanations a read if you are interested.

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2. philsnowFeb 2025
   The first image jumped out at me because the author chose to use blue and red which, when used on a map of the United States always indicates political affiliation, but the areas that were marked "red" and "blue" were reversed from what my expectation was (coasts and cities red, midwest + great plains blue).

   > A county like San Francisco or New York, which packs thousands of residents into a small area, now stands out with an intense color saturation, drawing the eye immediately to where the people actually are. Conversely, a vast county with a sparse population adopts a lighter tone, accurately reflecting its lower density without the distraction of an oversized area.

   (Emphasis on "saturation" added.) This isn't quite right, the most-densely populated hexes (large cities) are a pretty saturated red color yes, but the least-densely populated hexes (west Texas) are a pretty saturated blue color. In fact, this color palette makes it really difficult to see what the author intends.

   > Using the size of counties as a dimension to represent population can also showcase population centers and free up the color dimension to show another dimension like population density.

   Ok yeah that's a cartogram, I know how to expect that to look... wait, no, the image has the same center points for every county, a hexagon outline drawn around that, and then a confusingly-colored solid circle painted over each. The colors are confusing because the overwhelming effect is that the hex outlines dominate the perception of the dark blue nearly-point-sized "circles" in the majority of the map.

   Look at Nevada. On the first map Clark County (where Las Vegas is) is a light blue colored hex in a state of mostly dark blue hexes and Washoe County (where Reno is) is light red. On the second map Clark is the largest light blue circle in the state and Washoe is a smaller light blue circle, which seems to be the reverse of what the first map says. ...Also, Washoe appears to be in a different place maybe? It seems to have moved north a hex.

   I'm not just picking nits, this is difficult stuff, but an extremely powerful way to convey a ton of densely-packed (no pun intended) information, when done right. See, for instance [0][1][2][3] all by Edward Tufte.

   [0] "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Informati...

   [1] "Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0961392126

   [2] "Beautiful Evidence" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0961392177

   [3] "Envisioning Information" https://www.amazon.com/Envisioning-Information-Edward-R-Tuft...

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3. B4CKlashFeb 2023
   There are few books by the American Statistician Edward Tufte worth checking out. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations, all exceptional works of art. The books act as both a teaching guide and a compendium of beautiful historical infographical-artifacts.
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4. cratermoonApr 2021
   There's value in visual representations of complex things. See for example Edward Tufte. People probably just think of him as visualizing data, but his book Visual Explanations goes into many other areas.

   My preference these days is to use a text-based representation to generate diagrams with tools like Structurizr DSL, WebSequenceDiagrams, PlantUML and Graphviz. The source for the diagram(s) can be kept in the repo with the executable code and versioned.

   Maybe in another decade we'll get some tools that can take the executable source code, along with all the deployment descriptors, the Kubernetes charts, Terraform configuration files, shell scripts, and so on and generate meaningful visualizations.

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5. foobarbecueApr 2020
   See also Ad Reinhard's blue paintings, which are combinations of very subtly different blues. I like them a lot and recently learned about them in Edward Tufte's excellent book Visual Explanations. https://www.google.com/search?q=ad+reinhardt+blue&tbm=isch
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6. kthejoker2Aug 2019
   My own humble suggestions - although the books are hardly forgotten. But I think people focus a lot on technical / engineering books, and very little on design / user experience / human behavior, which arguably contribute much more to the overall impressions end users have of programmers' work.

   First, the greatest book of all time, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - an amazingly introspective and insightful look into how to live an examined life and improve oneself.

   And then if you want to learn lower-case "design thinking", my top 10 books

   * Design for Everyday Things - duh. I re-read chunks of it all the time.

   * Tufte - hard to pick one, I might actually be iconoclastic and go with Visual Explanations which I think has more to offer programmers over pure data visualization. Again, just grab one every day, flip through 3-4 pages, rinse, repeat.

   * User Story Mapping - Extremely memorable book - it gives you a pretty clear field guide on prioritization, empathy, communication ... just a great book.

   * Badass by Kathy Sierra - I flip through this book again and again. It is gospel truth about what motivates humans.

   * The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design - IDEO's most practical book. (Close second: Designing Interactions.)

   * Universal Methods of Design - another deeply practical book, lots of good tips and examples.

   * Universal Principles of Design - Sister book to the Universal Methods. Again, straightforward, flip to any page and get an idea when you're brainstorming.

   * Thinking in Systems - I recommend you skim this book through, but come back to it a lot, it grows with you.

   * Inspired by Marty Cagan - again, love nuts and bolts process books.

   * Don't Make Me Think! - still a classic, still see these mistakes being made all the time in modern app dev.

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