The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Tufte's first and most influential book established the principles of data visualization as a serious discipline, arguing that graphical excellence consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency. He introduced concepts now embedded in the vocabulary of anyone who works with data: the data-ink ratio, chartjunk, the lie factor, and small multiples. The book is itself an object lesson in the principles it advocates — self-published and designed by Tufte to exacting typographic standards, it demonstrated that form and content are inseparable. His historical examples, from Minard's map of Napoleon's Russian campaign to Playfair's eighteenth-century statistical graphics, show that the best data visualization has always been about honest reasoning, not decoration. Possibly the most influential design book of the last half century, it remains required reading for anyone building products that present information to human beings.