Beautiful Evidence

edwardtufte.com

Beautiful Evidence

Tufte despises PowerPoint with infectious intensity, pointing to its tendency to dumb-down language (via bullet points) and to junk-up charts. His gift for describing the sort of brain-deadening effects of bad PP will delight anyone who has phased out during a presentation. And bad design hurts presenters as much as it harms their message: "...your audience will quickly and correctly conclude that you don't know much about data and evidence," he writes in Beautiful Evidence (2006). Tufte's redo of the medical data is an exercise in typographic minimalism, showing all of the data in an easy-to-compare table with helpful cues—the sloping lines that signal which data changed most.