Edward Tufte

Information Designer
Nicole Langstaff
Digital Art & Design
Fall 2013
Biography
Edward Tufte is an American-
born information designer and
statistician that is known for
being a pioneer in the art of data
visualization and the Galileo of
graphics. He was born in 1942
in Kansas City, Missouri and later
grew up in Beverly Hills, California.
He earned his Bachelors and
Masters Degrees in statistics at
Stanford University, and then a
political science PhD from Yale
University which he used to begin
teaching about political economy
and data analysis at Princeton.
His teaching materials from his
time at Princeton University
became the basis for his most
notable work, The Visual Display
of Quantitative Information, which
eventually became a commercial
success. Tuftes essay The
Cognitive Style of Powerpoint
criticizes the Microsoft Office
software on its use of simplistic
thinking and bullet points when
presenting data.
He is also a sculptor and has
shown fifty large-scale abstract
outdoor installations in the
last ten years. He invented a
tool called Sparkline which
is a condensed graph of some
trend or measurement usually
embedded into text for easy
reference. He serves as professor
emeritus of political science,
statistics, and computer science
at Yale University, and was
recently assigned to the American
Recovery and Reinvestments Act
by President Barack Obama in
order to give graphic transparency
to the use of Recovery-related
funds. He is currently traveling
the U.S. giving one-day courses
on data visualization and graphic
presentation skills.
Work
Java Railroad, 1990 Escaping Flatlands, 1990
Log Animals, 2006
Storm Clouds, 1997
Weather Map of Japan, 1990
Escaping Flatlands sculpture, 1997-2003
Bibliography
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte
http://www.aldrichart.org/exhibitions/past/tufte.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th_1azZA2OY
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12748181