Edward Tufte Quotes

I didn't think that personal style had much value in graphic design.

Graphic design was largely about communication in an artistic or creative manner, much like writing is used to convey ideas. Many designers completely miss that aspect of the "art." Some are completely satisfied with just making things pretty, without taking the communication element into consideration.

Graphic design, which evokes the symmetria of Vituvius, the dynamic symmetry of Hambidge, the asymmetry of Mondrian; which is a good gestalt, generated by intuition or by computer, by invention or by a system of coordinates, is not good design if it does not communicate.

If you want to communicate something, you'd better make sure that your design piece is well-dressed and that its teeth are fixed. At the same time, I still believe that if it is only stylistically great and it has nothing to say, it still is not going to make a lasting impression on anybody.

Design is thinking made visual.

Us visual thinkers like me, be good at things like industrial design, graphics, art, those kind of jobs.

Problems with visual design can turn users off so quickly that they never discover all the smart choices you made with navigation or interaction design.

Dont confuse legibility with communication. Just because something is legible doesnt mean it communicates and, more importantly, doesnt mean it communicates the right thing.

Color does not add a pleasant quality to design - it reinforces it.

Good design doesn't date. Bad design does.

As a visual person, I love a creative resume. Putting in a little effort on the design side will show that you care about making things look good.

Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.

Anyone with a computer and a design program can create a page layout. But unless you're trained in design, it won't look very good and it won't communicate very well.

I wanted to be a writer as a teen... so storytelling was my first love. In my late teens, design became an obsession as I realized that I could express myself through the medium. Much later, when I founded Fuseproject in 1999, our slogan became 'design brings stories to life.'

I like design, I like details, to me it is just another form of self-expression.

Bringing words to life, storyboards show you things that words can't.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

The way to do good basic design isn't actually to be really smart about it, but to try to have a few basic concepts.

For years I thought I was just a writer, but when I sat down to design and started playing around with it, I realized that, really, it's pretty easy. Obviously it's more than just a set of rules, but the basics of design are actually pretty simple and quite mathematical. The link between data and design works at quite a fundamental level.

Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.

I am more of a visual person than a verbal person. For me, I think, the excitement is the fact that I found a way of telling the story as I want to tell it, in a medium that I could master.

I'm a visual thinker, so I think of everything visually, first. A lot of what an issue will become for me starts with me thinking, "What's a great cover?," or "What's the splash image?," or "What is the title of the issue? How do I see the text?" I think about all of that stuff, and then the story comes out of that imagery.

I think the best thing I learned from drawing comics is that it's a great exercise in concision.

PowerPoint is like being trapped in the style of early Egyptian flatland cartoons rather than using the more effective tools of Renaissance visual representation.

Some of the commercial work I do is helping people to improve their presentations and add some design thinking. There are so many amazing things in science, and such great data, which can often be locked away. It's in the minds of these amazing practitioners, who can't necessarily express what they want in a visual way.