Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities

EDWARD R. TUFTE. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997.156 Pages. $45.00.

Visual Explanations is the third gospel of visual design according to Yale professor Edward Tufte. The Biblical allusion is only slight hyperbole; Tufte's previous award-winning books, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information, have attracted an extraordinary following among a diverse crowd ranging from journalists to artists to scientists our modem-day Peters and Doubting Thomases. The power of these books lies in their ability to explicate the mysteries at the intersection of the human eye and the graphic. What are the Ten Commandments or Beatitudes of visual design? Tufte's books state them with authority, backed by beautiful and meticulously self-published figures that cogently communicate the underlying principles like wordless parables.

Tufte explains in the introduction that while his first two books dealt with pictures of numbers and nouns, respectively, Visual Explanations is about pictures of verbs - that is, the vexing task of representing the stories of action and motion pictorially. As such, this book is relentlessly multidisciplinary, and devotes considerable attention to visual representation in science and engineering.

Two of Tufte's scientific case studies make for the most compelling reading in the book. His description of John Snow's landmark discovery of the cause of an 1854 cholera outbreak in London explains more about visual design and the scientific method in eleven pages than you can find anywhere else.

Tufte then turns his keen eye and stern judgment to the role of graphics in the fateful decision to launch the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. His research into this complex case is simply remarkable; it reminds me of old Quincy, M.E., reruns in which the medical examiner beats the police to the murderer because his unique perspective reveals what is hidden to others. In the case of the Challenger, Tufte cuts through the blizzard of discussion of bureaucracies, rockets, and O-rings to a tragic flaw of visual miscommunication: "Had the correct scatterplot or data table been constructed, no one would have dared to risk the Challenger in such cold weather." Even if you disagree with this conclusion, Tufte's case, agonizingly constructed, is impossible to ignore.

After this thrilling beginning, Visual Explanations loses a bit of steam as it surveys other, less captivating (to me) subjects. Such is the gamble and reward in a multidisciplinary work. Tufte commits a chapter to the visual explanation of magic tricks and methods of distracting the viewer's eye during such tricks (my favorite example from the world of advertising: the nearly unreadable all-capital-letter Surgeon General's warnings on cigarette cartons). A chapter on parallelism contains examples of recordkeeping aboard the Soviet Salyut 6 spacecraft, as well as the labeling of a group picture at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The latter is a perfect example of Tufte's genius for spying the visual in the everyday: did you ever before wonder how best to identify each of 145 people standing in close quarters on a porch? After reading this book, you will know how to do it and, more importantly, why it works visually!

The book concludes with two chapters on multiple images, which use their similarity to convey vast amounts of information in a small space, and "confections," or assemblies of visual events. Tufte's original contribution to medical science is discussed in the former: a redesign of the medical chart into one page of multiple mini-charts that contains more information in less space than is available to doctors and nurses today. The tour of confections is less convincing to me, although the reader is continually rewarded with stunning images, such as the reproduction of a painting of artist Jackson Pollock walking on water! Two confections of note: a Washington Post graphic describing the dangers of swimming in the Potomac River; and the engraved plaques aboard the Pioneer spacecraft, which depict humankind in corporeal, planetary, and galactic contexts.

Tufte's emphasis on quantitative science in Visual Explanations should not deter non-scientists from reading it. Interspersed are photographs of Giacometti's walking-man sculptures, a flowchart of modem pop and rock music groups, and even a two-page color reproduction of an illustration of Babar the Elephant. There is something for every visually alert reader to marvel at, and a feast of ideas for those of us who use graphics in our professions. You, too, may become a disciple of Tufteanism!

John Knox is an assistant professor of geography and meteorology at Valparaiso University in Indiana, and a Science & Technology columnist for National Forum. His Fall 1996 column focused on the influence of Tufte's writings on the sciences.

Copyright National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Journal Fall 1998
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