Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth Paperback – November 30, 2020

For my wifey

Timely, packed well in foam envelope. Good job!

Tufte is a powerhouse in graphic design but I don't find him helpful for me at least. I once took one of his workshops and I own all of his books, but I have decided to return this last one. He holds some strange believes (like you should start every meeting with 10 min of silent reading). The material is also strangely organized, so its difficult to find content relevant to what I am doing (map design). I find that I need to do too much work to convert him knowledge base into something useful and helpful for me that I can easily apply in my work or when doing workshops.

If you got here from Tufte‘s masterpieces, „The Visual Display of Quantitative Information“ or „Envisioning Information“, stop here and re-read those. This book lacks a clear thesis, and resembles nothing so much as the scraps on Tufte‘s desk pasted into bindings for those foolish enough to pay for it. A couple of points recur in the text, especially Tufte’s conviction that lists in a sentence should be replaced with what he calls „stacklists,“ which are basically bulletpoints but without the bullets, and centered. He also devotes more space than you would expect to his loathing of the American healthcare system.Sections of his earlier, better books are reprinted here to pad the runtime. I would not recommend this book to anybody.

Tufte shall reign forever, this a masterpiece, mark my words, a book you will never forget.

I have no idea who this book was written for.Designers?Data wranglers?It just seems you are lost in Tufte's rambling brain.There are moments of brilliance, but turbulence of ideas you have to sort through makes it not worth the effort.FINAL RECOMMENDATION: buy all of Tufte's other books. And save your time and money and skip over this one.

There are numerous good insights in this book, but Tufte provides absolutely zero organization, information hierarchy, or clearly articulated principles. The book is full of rants about the evils of rigid, grid-based typography and the need for thoughtful layout, but the book's own text struck me as disorganized and cramped, with the main text running together with image captions that made it difficult to follow the thread of any idea.This book could open your mind to some important new ideas but I don't recommend it for anyone looking for the clarity of Tufte's classic works.