I thought Tufte’s philosophy of clarifying with the addition of detail as opposed to simplifying graphs was really interesting. I think the different types of information that can be conveyed at the Macro/Micro level was best examplified through the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. While zooming into each names in the memorial give insight into individual stories of the veterans, looking at the memorial from further away conveys the magnitude of the loss. I also thought it was interesting that they decided to arrange the names by chronological order as opposed to alphabetical order.

One example I didn’t understand was the graph displaying temperature and conductivity of different elements. Tufte seemed to find the display very effective–“Note how easily these displays organize the material, recording observations from several hundred studies and also enforcing comparisons among quite divergent results …”. However, I personally found the individual plots way to cluttered and distracting from the overall trend. It made me wonder where is the line between informative/excessive and what is the “ideal” level of detail that designers should strive to achieve.