<i>If the only thing you’re doing is coming up with a single number, then you’re doing arithmetic, not visualization.</i>
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<i>And I think that the goal of visualization is not finding elaborate ways to encode information. I try to encode as little as possible.</i>
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<i>But to me this feels like imposing a design on the data, and drawing attention to the design more than the data.</i><p>The whole thing is great, I'm glad I stuck with it past the first few images to see where he's going. These bits stuck out though and his work is so often things I wish I had thought of.
Everything else at style.org is equally amazing. Corum was, IIRC, a student of Tufte's.<p>Here's an especially great pair:<p><a href="http://style.org/unladenswallow/" rel="nofollow">http://style.org/unladenswallow/</a><p><a href="http://style.org/strouhalflight/" rel="nofollow">http://style.org/strouhalflight/</a>
One thing that surprised me was the statement about a sun that would soon engulf the nearby planet - and being so relatively large that the planet was 'more than half' in sunlight (~ the sun's disc shines 'around the corners').<p>But isn't that true on earth too (to a much smaller degree)? As long as the sun's radius is larger than the earth, then sunlight will fall simultaneously on more than a half of the earth's surface, no?
I wish I had more than one upvote to give to this talk. I was giddy half way through it and my jaw was hanging open by the end of it. What an inspiring look at the design process. I'm an interaction designer and this REALLY spoke to me.
This is a great presentation on how to effectively communicate data and it is not just putting raw data on a slide. it takes time and major creativity to communicate. Read the presentation for another reason, a good example of a catchy, relevant intro tied to a closing.... something that makes us all better communicators.
I don't have a comment smart enough for HN to express how cool I think this is. I want to print it out and thumbtack it to my wall like I'm 14
I really like the layout of this talk. I hate when people just link to the powerpoint of a talk and expect everyone to follow along like they were there, with no narration.