Tufte - Chapter 5:

I really enjoyed the continution of Tufte’s writing and focus on usage of color in information design. Tufte outlines four categories of functions of color: to label, measure, represent or imitate reality, and to enliven or decorate. I found the distinction between the different uses of color is a little vague. The categories themselves make sense to me, but in the example case given of the Swiss mountain map, the colors distinguishing water from stone was considered an example of labeling, but I feel like it is also an imitation/representation of reality because the colors used correspond to the color of the natural elements.

The rules provided on how to effectively use color reinforced a lot of intuitive understandings that I had, such as not using too many bright colors, or the increase in effectiveness when contrasting bright focal points with dull backgrounds. However, one example of the color usage stuck out to me because I didn’t find it very effective. I can’t tell if I’m used to standard mathematical notation but I honestly found the colorful proof of euclidean geometry to be difficult to parse. However, this made me wonder if my understanding of the more complicated proof is a function of me not knowing the language of the symbols yet.

Few - Chartjunk Debate

I think this paper points out a lot of important flaws in the study described in the paper. Designing an experiment that has controlled assumptions is vital to producing results that can be reproduced and also more widely accepted. Even before reading this paper, I had reached the conlcusion that Tufte has a little too much faith in the power of data. Not all data is processable in its simplest form and requires the use of embellishments to make points. I appreciate Few’s acknowledgement that “no one graph can display the full story that lives in a set of data”. However, I didn’t quite understand the jump to the characteristics Few describes must be in graphs in the typical manner and wanted to know more about the evidence for these characteristics/how they reached this conclusion. It felt like the paper dispelled the credibility of the study effectively, but didn’t provide reasoning for the conclusions suddenly presented at the end.