Sam K R05

Time based graphics—how ironic that I’d be reading this at such an unusual hour. It is for this reason that I will stick strictly to summarizing this information so that I may imagine how I could apply the information to my personal graphic designs.

Tufte opens with a discussion of Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s satellites and his sketches of their nightly shifts. It was through these sketches that he discovered their unequal rotation cycles, and it is this kind of discovery that we, as infographic designers, aim to replicate and communicate to our audiences. It is indeed a time series in that he is recording movement from day to day—movement in its simplest form. (In this spot today—in that spot tomorrow.) He has very little chart junk, however if he were to try to arrange all of these sketches into one cohesive infographic, he would need to add some labels and explanations.

The next infographic of note is the corkscrew diagrams. These expand upon Galileo’s idea of recording the unequal rotations by charting and comparing the satellites’ cycles. The resulting graphic is simply beautiful, and the labeling is done well. They name each line by their corresponding satellite along with a roman numeral. Later down the chart, where we might lose track of which line is called what, it is re-labeled with just the roman numeral. The time-based lines are unobtrusive and scaled back—something that I need to do on my graphic.

The next notable graphics are the diagrams of flight and railroad schedules and stops. Tufte seems to find these as successful. Perhaps it’s just scale, but I find them to be unorganized, random and disorienting. They are also in another language, from another culture, but if I had seen this graphic with English labels, I still think I’d be confused as a first-time reader. On the Czech one, some dots are bigger and some are smaller. The times are crammed in along the inside edges of circles. Some lines are of one weight and others are of others. There seems to be no grid-like arrangement and no sound way to make comparisons. The same can be said about the Chinese train schedule. I am confused as to why Tufte thinks there are so wonderful.

Tufte ends this chapter by revisiting the dangers of trapped white space and tables, and redesigns.