I just spent a day at Edward Tufte’s course on infor­ma­tion design at the Seat­tle Mar­riott Water­front. I’ve always known his work, I’ve talked about it in design classes, I’ve told stu­dents to read his books, but not once have I heard him speak. Now I can con­fi­dently say that his cap­tions speak louder than words. Snicker.

That’s not to say he wasn’t insight­ful. The books have always been a nice trans­la­tion of clas­sic design prin­ci­ples into sta­tic visual infor­ma­tion design, but most of the course was sim­ply him par­rot­ing his own words. What made it unbear­able was that he spoke them with the life­less apa­thy of a sta­tis­tics pro­fes­sor. Oh wait, he was one.

Aside from his lack of spark, there were a num­ber of nice things about the day. I got a box full of his books; I got a refresher on visual infor­ma­tion design; I had a chance to think more about forms of dis­sem­i­na­tion for my research (I tire of lim­it­ing my influ­ence to aca­d­e­mic pub­li­ca­tions). It was also a nice calm before my early May storm of deadlines.