Title: Beautiful Evidence
Author: Edward Tufte
Publisher: Graphics Press, Inc.

Can anyone really make a living telling people how to (and in many cases how not to) design charts and graphs? You better believe it. A professor emeritus of Statistics from Yale University, Dr. Tufte has transformed himself as the most authoritative figure on visual display of quantitative information through self-publishing a series of beautiful books on the topic, as well as one-day seminars around the country. It’s no wonder that he has been dubbed the “da Vinci of Data” by the New York Times.

His first three books were pivotal in shaping my thinking about marketing and communications in the life sciences. So it’s no wonder that I found myself anxiously awaiting the arrival of my signed copy of Beautiful Evidence. I set aside an afternoon and locked myself in a conference room to take a deep dive in what the maestro had to say. This bookis the typical Tufte masterpiece. Nothing more. Nothing less.

What makes Beautiful Evidence different than his previous books is the amount of scientific data that he discusses. This is clearly of major importance to any life science marketer, because as we all know, our audiences (scientists) tend to be deeply moved by data. It’s tempting for graphic designers to develop imaginative ways to display data, and there are certainly examples of success in this arena (my compliments to the creative director at Seed Magazine, every issue of which is a collection of jaw-dropping charts and graphs). But ‘dressing up’ or overly designing data representations can very easily offend scientists. Tufte provides the ground rules for the visual display of data through colorful examples in pages and pages illustrations.

In one of the later chapters of the book, Tufte tackles presentation design, where he provides 10 case studies of non-PowerPoint presentations, claiming that the software program “compared to other common presentations tools, reduces the analytical quality of serious presentations of evidence.” Seriously, PowerPoint enables very poor information design. In this chapter, Tufte elegantly brings presentation design back to basics, compares it with “good teaching”, and gives colorful examples of the importance of a good presentation. Incidentally, this chapter is a reprint of a the essay that Tufte had previously published.

In short, if your job requires communication with scientists, you would do well to read Beautiful Evidence. For me, it is yet another proof point that the psychology of scientist is one that requires careful understanding and consideration.

Written by Hamid Ghanadan - President
The Linus Group, Inc.