bestkungfu weblog

After six years, today was more than worth the price of admission. The Edward Tufte class was outstanding. It’s the best $320 I ever got my boss to spend. Tufte is a fascinating and engaging speaker, and unlike a lot of other design-oriented presenters, brings his A game to the seminar. Over the course of the day, we covered parts of each of his books, chapters from his upcoming fourth book, and as a bonus, we saw several first-edition books from the 16th century showing how to (and how not to) display data and information.

The trading card incident

Lunch and the break periods are “office hours”, in which he signs autographs and talks about design with anyone who lines up. At the first break, I got my autographable item of choice ready. I have a Tuftenator trading card, which I received from Tom Chi of OK-Cancel. Actually, that statement is no longer true: I had a Tuftenator card. Presenting it to Tufte, I asked, “Would you be willing to sign this?” He looked at the card, mentioned that he hadn’t seen it before, said he felt uncomfortable signing it, and asked me if he could keep it, offering instead to sign one of my books. Naturally, I said he could. As I walked back to my seat, I had an uncomfortable feeling that I may have set Tom up for a cease-and-desist letter, and set about compiling evidence to prevent such an event from occurring.

Round two: At the lunch break, I bring my copy of Envisioning Information and my laptop, with OK-Cancel’s story arc covering the East Coast vs. West Coast information design war. As I showed Tufte that the card is part of a game, and its representation of him as a Terminator-like character is all lovingly intended, he smiled a bit and told me that he felt like one would feel if one were the victim of a Doonesbury comic. That reference alone is what you might call “information-rich.” This guy is good. (I managed to skitter up and ask him a topical question later on, but that discussion is good enough for another post.)

How to watch Tufte

One thing I noticed about Tufte when I first started reading his books was actually a minor detail in his writing style. Pick up any of his books and flip to any page. Guaranteed, he has finished the paragraph on that page, and with no space to spare. You probably didn’t notice any difference in the content itself (that is, he didn’t dance around on this page just to fill it), but sure enough, he always completes a thought, and never resorts to typographical crutches (”next page”) to get by. His design ethic is in everything I’ve seen from him, and that’s not something you can say about the everyday average guru these days.

To my great delight, I found that the attention to detail is not just in his books, but also in his presentations. He threw out a series of maxims for giving good presentations, but what stood out to me was how he handled his own sessions: each session started precisely on time, and each session finished precisely on time. Completely professional, completely scholarly, and with a spoken style that not only indicates his own interest in his subject, but also shows he is amply prepared (both of which are on his list). And when he demonstrates a point from one of the books, every example, pro and con, before and after, what have you, is on two contiguous pages. He has you flip to a given page, and there it is, everything you need for the next 10 minutes of his lecture, right there. No flipping back and forth needed.

If you’ve been thinking about this class, go right now and sign up. But pay attention to the things he’s not saying if you want to get the most out of it.