Ben Shneiderman Quotes

I feel that every day, all of us now are being blasted by information design. It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. There's something almost quite magical about visual information. It's effortless; it literally pours in.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

One picture is worth a thousand words.

“One picture is worth a thousand words,” said an ancient Chinese; but it may take ten thousand words to validate it.

I think of myself as a translator. I just change the dry, unfeeling language of data into a visual language that allows for feeling.

A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

Information is expanding daily. How to get it out visually is important.

I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.

Pictures have a lot more power than text. Text is just a bunch of little symbols. You have to actually read it and imagine it, and even that can be censored. With pictures, it's a lot more immediate.

I believe in a visual language that should be as strong as the written word.

Information design has been around since the 1970s. Pioneers like Yale University design guru Edward Tufte and design agency Pentagram have long known and used its power. But now with the rise of the Internet, it's having something of a second birth.

Unfortunately, one picture is worth a thousand facts.

Anybody can tell you what they think. But if you can illustrate what you think, you have a better chance of persuading people.

What's great is that each medium has a unique set of things that it does and does well. Film is a visual medium, and obviously, you can't fit a whole book into two hours unless you're really economical about it. Obviously, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and on some level, it's sort of true.

The image, like the voice, came in stages. I never sat down with anyone and said, 'Let's design an image.'

I write really visually. In my head, I'm constantly picturing things as I'm writing, so for me, videos are such an expressive part of my job.

I feel like there are actually a lot of relationships between a website and a film in terms of designing an experience for a screen.

I'm huge on visuals. I love visuals.

Design is thinking made visual.

Personally, I'm not very keen on the visualization of absolutely everything.

Visualizing information is a form of knowledge compression.

Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.

I never analyzed whether I had a style or whether I didn't. I wouldn't be able to describe my style or even tell if I have one or not.

I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.

If I really believe that visual representation and narrative are ways to convey important, complex ideas, and if the world is gravitating toward this form, then geez, I better do it myself. I want to do it myself.