Ben Shneiderman Quotes

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

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

Beautiful Evidence is about the theory and practice of analytical design.

A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures.

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.

Much of the way we understand the world is through images. That's what I think good art does - it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in.

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

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

Visualizing information is a form of knowledge compression.

Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves.

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.

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.

The image onscreen takes you forward, it's the driving force of the piece and it's also the information that you're given.

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.

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.

I have always attempted to create images that deliver the maximum amount of information about the subject.

If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

You know how misleading an image is. You see an image in the newspaper, if they left the caption off, good luck knowing what's going on. There is something inherently misleading about images, so they need annotation.

Simplification seems to be the removal of objects for the goal of making a graphic as clean and uncluttered as possible. Whereas, with optimization, it feels like there's more intelligence in that. It maintains the usability, but tries to distill something down to its essence. But with some data-sets you have to be careful because, as with linear, print journalism, it's easy to shave off facts that don't quite fit the flow.

Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.

Most screenplays, most motion pictures, owe much more to the screenplay. Ingmar Bergman has such an economy of language, so little language in his piece, it is so visual, his moods are introduced and buttressed by camera rather than by word or character. But again, that's unique.

Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader.

Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.

Ladies and gentlemen, a picture is not worth a thousand words. In fact, we found some pictures that are worth 500 billion words.