Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7908 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 213 pages

From Scientific American
"Science and art," according to Tufte, "have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information." This book is about how that seeing turns into showing. Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale University and author of three previous widely praised books on visual evidence, displays outstanding examples of the genre. One of the most arresting is Galileo's series of hand-drawn images of sunspots. A colleague of Galileo, the author tells us, said that the astronomer's drawings "delight both by the wonder of the spectacle and the accuracy of expression." That, Tufte says, is beautiful evidence.

Editors of Scientific American

Business Week, Best Innovation and Design Books for 2006
"Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence is a masterpiece from a pioneer in the field of data visualization. His book in brilliant. The Galileo of graphics has done it again. It's not often an iconoclast comes along, trashes the old ways, and replaces them with an irresistible new interpretation. By teasing out the sublime from the seemingly mundane world of charts, graphs, and tables, Tufte has proven to a generation of graphic designers that great thinking begets great presentation. In Beautiful Evidence, his fourth work on analytical design, Tufte digs more deeply into art and science to reveal very old connections between truth and beauty -- all the way from Galileo to Google."

Customer Reviews

Disappointing
Like many of the other reviewers, I too am a fan of Tufte. This book, however, is not up to the normal standards that his other books are. The chapter on the evils of PowerPoint was very amusing and insightful, but you can purchase that separately from Amazon.com at The Cognitive Style of Power Point.

Weak
If you are looking for guidance on metrics presentation or insight, pass right by this book. The pictures are nice enough I suppose; but there are many, many, and I mean many, other books, Tufte's included, that are significantly more worthwhile.

The least of the Four Books
This book does not hold up in comparison to the first 3 from Tuft. This appears to be made up of a number of unconnected papers. The most important in my opinion is the introduction of sparklines. It's worthwhile to revisit Minard, The inclusion of the work on Powerpoint is OK, but the inclusion of Tufte artworks/sculptures seemed a little self serving and left me confused as to the point. The production qualities of the book are superb, but the content inconsistent