I’ve always wanted to read this book, a classic in the field of informational graphics. But was put off by the cover.
The graphic doesn’t convey any information at all. And inside the book there’s this diagram, touted as a model of clarity.
I think it would confound the little corporal himself. And it reminds me of this cartoon by Gahan Wilson.
I know I’m being unfair to Mr. Tufte, but funny is not fair. In fact, there’s an infographic I created that demonstrates this quite clearly.
My colleague Ben Greenman has recently gotten into infographics. He says it’s because a character in a novel he’s writing creates charts for a living, but I know Ben pretty well and he doesn’t need that pretext. He has O.C.D., which in his case stands for obsessive comical disorder, a condition in which the mind becomes fixated on any object that you can wring laughs out of—even charts.
Many of the charts Greenman creates on I Love Charts erode what he calls the “core morality of charts” by using tautology for comic effect.
I don’t think anyone, even Edward R. Tufte, could disagree. It just is what it is.
