I agree 100% with the issues you raise — for as much as Edward talks about avoiding clutter, he doesn’t seem to be able to recognize it in his own mock-ups. The white space between image thumbs is elegant and gives them breathing room and balance. Using every pixel to display information may result in more information, but it can also result in more anxiety.

Apparently he didn’t approve of your comment – I don’t see it anywhere on his site

Ken

Apparently his core prejudice has not changed, which is unfortunate, because it means that those interested in non-print displays of information (read: just about all of us) have to go through a critical filtering process when listening to him. Thank you for doing so and calling him out on this clunker.

I attended Tufte’s course in San Jose today. He showed the iPhone video and expanded on it a little. His response to the stock page criticism you make (and apparently he’s gotten a lot of email on this) is that you *must* have that context — it’s inappropriate to look at only one day’s data if you want to get the most information from a graphic.

I think that’s debatable — some people might be able to keep the context in their heads so they don’t need it on the screen, and sometimes the task is different, like you say.

Tufte likes dense and efficient displays with everything at print/typographic resolution. He argues that adding more information doesn’t create clutter if the design is done right. But I think that assumes that you’re *reading* the document/graphic like you would text, rather than scanning or searching it (or doing whatever other visual tasks).

I hope he responds to your question. I’m sure he’s considered this and has a good argument. He’s brilliant, but I think that when he goes beyond his core expertise of statistical displays (and into, say, interface design), his ideas may need a little more thought. Not that he isn’t already way ahead of most of us.

Kevin