Edward Tufte has posted a video and essay reviewing successes and failures of presentation and design in Apple’s iPhone. It is an especially easy to digest block of Tufte’s long running attention to information density.
- Keep information on a single surface
- Small multiples are great
- High resolution is nice
- Computer administrative junk obstructs information
- Images are superior to cartoons of images
This is mostly common sense stuff, unfortunately when we play desktop publisher we are left with tools that do not have common sense. A graph in excel plotting three numbers over 12 weeks should have the same resolution as the table of data it is meant to augment or replace, and preferably the resolution should be much higher than that.
Sadly, this is never the case.
We should be able to easily place graphics, charts, tables, and text into a document in our editors. How did Microsoft Word beat the Quark’s and inDesign’s and Acrobats to failing at this? Why do we write with an editor that is a typewriter dressed up as a Publisher?
Design is then dictated by the medium.
Typewritten materials
- spacing indented first line and double spaced paragraphs
- two spaces after full stops ending sentences
- no images
- no graphics
- minimal tables
- Single font size
Powerpoint slide decks
- minimal tables due to import / export complexity
- Graphics that were acceptable on 13” to 17” screens projected to 70” diagonals
- Clip Art
- Sliding Animations
- Wipes
- Screen reading
Most unfortunate.
