I pre-ordered Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence from Amazon. After reading two of his earlier books (I own Visual Display), I was looking forward to his first in years. Bottom line… the book is beautifully made, and two chapters shine, but this tome feels more like a collection of uneven essays than the tour-de-force of his earlier volumes.
The chapters I enjoyed?
The one on sparklines, which wasn’t a new concept for me, given the lengthy web discussion of same, but since I haven’t read that entire forum, the edited version was most welcome.
The evisceration of PowerPoint was a guilty pleasure. I’ve long felt frustrated by the format, and this was simply backing for my previously held biases (1, 2). Two full pages are simply a paper version of Peter Norvig’s brilliant Gettysburg address. Note: Anil Dash has often written interesting material about business software
I haven’t created a “deck” since joining OpenDNS. I’m pleased with that fact.