A great source that people presenting data all should read is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. I'm not sure I agree with everything in it, but it does have a lot of great insights. (Chart junk)

Godel Escher Bach is fairly bible-ish if you ask me

Another set of books I consider to be "one" bible are Edward Tufte's (1) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, (2) Envisioning Information, (3) Visual Explanations and (4) Beautiful Evidence.

This is extremely nice. "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" and "Envisioning Information" are, IMHO, masterworks.

Ironically, the OP recommends that you read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, as well. I suspect that the mediocre example (I thought it was reasonably readable and somewhat interesting) was there more as a demonstration of the fact that R makes non-scatter plots easily, too.

I would recommend Edward Tufte's books on data visualization, which are themselves fantastic examples of how to visually arrange information to maximize understanding. "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is a great place to start.

Looks great. The landing page reminds me of the cover of Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/graphics/vdqi_bookcover.gif).

I really don't get people's admiration of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." I bought and read it years ago with great excitement, but felt very let down by it. I wrote a detailed Amazon review about it: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R11NYC3OE3LBE/ref...

Either because the infographic designers haven’t read what The Visual Display of Quantitative Information about accurately depicting time-series, or because they have read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and are abusing its dicta to make graphs that are as dramatic as possible.

I have The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and it's an inspiring read. Which other books would you recommend for developers?

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte (Graphics Press, 1983).

I typed that citation from memory; it shows how many times I've read that book. It talks about the same kind of things, but the animation linked above is even better.

What would Tufte say about someone that tried to "liberate" his beautiful, expensive and excellent books? Would he be outraged at the sight of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" available as a pdf on a torrent site?

If Swartz and his ideas were so marvelous, why is Tufte still charging any money for his work?

"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Tufte. A pretty book, and occasionally useful as a reference too.

It's cool that they share this data, but that design reminds of the bad examples Edward Tufte includes in his The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Perhaps this is a good example of what E. Tufte calls "chartjunk" in his book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information".

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte.

If you ever need to give a presentation or write a report that uses any graphs or charts, this book gives simple guidelines that makes the visual information as clear as possible.

Graphic designers: please don't make charts difficult to read. This is useful data, but obscured by too much "non-data ink" as Edward Tufte said [1].

[1] Edward R. Tufte. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press, 1983. ISBN 0-9613921-0-X.

You suggest that we use CLIs for pretty much every task?

I -happily- spend most of my day in one CLI or another, but there are many, many things for which interactive graphical display of information is just the best choice.

If you never have done so, find a copy of Edward Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". You really need to find a professionally-printed dead-tree version; computer screens still can't do the book justice.

Oh:

> "koodies"

That word is spelt "cooties". ;)

No discussion of data visualization history is complete without mention of Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

The Design of Everyday Things: Donald A. Norman

The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst

Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte,
Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward R. Tufte

Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte

Small Is Beautiful by E. F. Schumache

The Art of Color by Johannes Itten

Were I to teach a course, that would be the list of text books required (so you would own them after). First and only assignment---read them. Final and only exam---what did you learn and understand. Supply proof.

That's just following Edward Tufte's maxim to minimize chart junk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk

Any of you on HN that aren't familiar with "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" should give it a read (and the rest of his books).

Concerning visualization I'd rather recommend Wilkinson's "The Grammar of Graphics" instead of Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information", since the former contains much more practical examples and advice.

I own all of his books and have read through them several times. I see them as filling a role somewhere between a guide and a listing taken together. It's easy enough to get 95% of the practical value by just reading one of them, but the remaining 3 provide a number of examples which can help to provide a broad perspective on Tufte's ideas while inspiring your own interpretation of them.

If you just want to make better charts, buy, a from memory guess, Envisioning Information. It provides most of the basics of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information but develops the ideas a little further and provides better, more modern examples. If you think it's a cool topic then buy them all because they're all pretty nice books.

Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

> Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book.

Agreed, its absolutely excellent. Thanks to Y Combinator for listing it in the book list.

> Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information...

Not agreed. In my opinion you might have missed what I felt was a main point of that book: Always learn the appropriate statistics required to understand the data, choose a correct visualization method to communicate those statistics effectively, and once you've understood it fully, confirmed the results, and removed all the cruft, then publish it.

1. The Bible. It encourages me to live in a way that's also good for others, especially when I'm feeling selfish and cynical, and it teaches me how to interact with them in a healthy way (e.g. the book of Proverbs).

2. The Elements of Style. I always enjoyed writing, but at first school taught me to write in a flowery, longwinded way. This was the book that cracked the code for me to good writing. It dispelled a lot of self-serving and ultimately self-defeating habits and paved the way to clean, helpful English. When I finally got into programming in my late twenties, I found that many of the same principles make good code.

3. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. This is like the Elements of Style but for graphs. Again, it encouraged me to cut through the hype and deliver the content as clearly and succinctly as possible --- to serve the reader, not stroke my ego.

Hey! I must confess I haven't actually read those myself, although I did recently buy Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitive Information", on which the Tufte class is based I believe. If you eventually get into typography in general, I can't recommend "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst enough. It's rightly called the typographer's bible.

The typesetting service sprang from the modest success of LaTeX Templates. The large number of visitors meant that I had a constant stream of questions from individuals and businesses asking about modifying templates to include/change this or that. I did the whole free support thing for 1 or 2 years, but eventually realized it's a never-ending thankless task and I may as well try to capitalize on this desire that people have. Like with Creodocs, I had no idea whether anyone would pay me for this. The number of existing services was very small. I made the site and linked to it from LaTeX Templates, which is the perfect place to advertise, and eventually I started to get a trickle of clients. My rate initially was something like $30USD/hour, which was an insanely large amount for a poor PhD student, and I even remember a client saying I was way undercharging for the quality of work! As I've had more and more clients, I've built up the Showcase page to show off what the service is capable of, and I believe this is an important draw to give legitimacy to the service and show what LaTeX itself is capable of. I haven't asked, but I imagine most of my clients come from LaTeX Templates so the key for me has been to provide something for free and then upsell to a paid service. Nothing new there :)

The first time I heard of this idea was at an Edward Tufte* seminar. He researches and publishes on the design of presented information and how that impacts how it's communicated. His books, especially The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, are highly recommended.

* https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

I don't think I saw The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte (available at http://www.amazon.com/The-Visual-Display-Quantitative-Inform... ) on the list. The Boston Globe's review is 100% correct: it's a visual Strunk and White.

See instead

Tufte, Edward: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (and the followup books)

Few, Stephen: Information Dashboard Design

Here are few that have influenced my work:

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn - Richard Hamming

The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander

The Humane Interface - Jef Raskin

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte

The Art Spirit - Robert Henri

The MBTA visualization[1] of the Boston subway system is phenomenal; a clear homage to Marey's trains[2], a beautiful train schedule graph from the late 1800's which I first came across in Edward Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information".

[1] http://mbtaviz.github.io/
[2] http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0003zP-18547/VDQI_P...

Edward Tufte's books, "Envisioning Information" and "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information".

Why suggest these books that seem just about graphic design, to an audience of mainly software developers? Well, aside from the stylistic points about graphical plots and figures, it is more deeply about being able to communicate effectively, with intention.

I find that all too commonly, many junior people who code are unable (or maybe more charitably, unpracticed) at formulating arguments or explanations for why something exists in the form it does, or how it ought to be designed, in a way that they can coherently explain to someone not deep in their code. It usually means that they have not spent time thinking about it deeply, and are stuck in the "show me lines of code to explain what something is" mode of thinking. Or that they can only explain the approach in terms of the specific lines they are writing -- they have not moved beyond that level of understanding.

I won't say it to the person generally, but I really have to bite my tongue when working with someone who has no way of explaining something (at an overall approach level) other than showing me lines of code. Stepping out of that realm into graphical communication is one way.

Being able to think graphically in a coherent way as a software developer means you start to think about how to explain your work to others as more than lines of code -- and in explaining to others, improving your own understanding of what you're writing. Btw, it also probably means that you're more likely move beyond the role of just a plain old software developer and become someone responsible for the design of systems, the direction of work.

I watched all but one of Lamport's videos on formal specification with TLA+, though I yet have to tackle some project with it.

Right now I got my hands on Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" as per some HNer recommendation (thank you!).

Yeah, I lose interest quickly, eh. There's so much cool things to learn that in the end I learn nothing well. Bummer.

edit: grammar, spelling

Metamathematics by Kleene. On Lisp by Graham. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Tufte.

> the ability to use a whiteboard boosts innovation

Beneath this simple statement is a career's worth of questions worth investigating. Oral and written communication are just two modes of conveying information and sharing ideas. Edward Tufte, for example, has made his career in exploring other modes, neatly summed up in the title of his most famous work, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information".

Engaging the visual/spatial functions of the brain, even if you can't draw more than wobbly trapezoids and shaky, uneven lines, can enrich thinking in ways I don't think we fully understand.

I'm not sure what all the barriers are to an inexpensive shared whiteboarding tool that's as natural and effortless as a dry-erase pen on a whiteboard. Everything we have now feels unnatural without a lot of practice, is far too clunky to be worth the effort, and/or is too expensive and flakey.

I think part of it is that they begin with a draw/paint tool, rather than cutting it down to the extreme simplicity of whiteboard. Would whiteboarding be as popular and useful if you had to pick up a "draw a square" tool, then switch to "draw a line" tool? Can we make the pad/stylus for "draw lines" have better haptics and a more natural hand/eye connection?

Books I bought that I've been enjoying this year:

Favorite Folktales from Around the World, by Jane Yolen [0]: Excellent short folk stories from many different regions. Great for short bursts of story, sometimes with interesting wisdom. As a game developer, some of them have been inspiring for hooks to maybe use in future projects

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Tufte [1]: Very fun to peruse the graphs and charts. The visualization of Napolean's army marching into Russian winter and back is a classic. I bought this because I was figuring out a novel UI for a video game about birds

Graphic Design: A New History, by Eskilson [2]: Goes over the history of graphic design and printing technology from pre-Gutenberg to the present day. I bought this because it was written by my college Art History professor. His class was my favorite in all of undergrad, and I wanted to experience more history delivered in his style.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394751884/

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0961392142/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300233280/

Edward Tufte's book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is a classic that is still relevant today. It was written before Excel charts etc but the key concepts, especially "less ink is better", is something that everyone should subscribe to. It also contains my favourite chart which is Charles Joseph Minard representation of Napleons march (and subsequent retreat) to Russia. It shows the size of the army, relevant to location and temperature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png

The Tufte books are brilliant. For dynamic charts, his first book (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) is the most relevant, it covers the theory - how to tell a good representation from a bad one - and the basics.

Readings in Information Visualization ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Readings-Information-Visualization-I... ) is a collection of papers covering a wide range of techniques for a wide range of tasks.

Apart from that, it's mostly a matter of picking up interesting ideas wherever you find them. flowingdata.com is nice, same with http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

I'm starting to love the typography of Edward Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." I'm loving it because unlike a lot of other texts I've read its margins provide room for very detailed notes. In a normal book if I wanted to sketch out an amazing proof, I wouldn't have the space, but his book has room for that and more.

You know what would suck? If people didn't have any idea that choosing one page design over another actually changed how there product would be used. Not that long ago there was an interview with Joel Spolsky on here where he pointed out that small differences could really change a community. This is just as true in books as it is in an internet application.

So there is no perfect page. There is no secret law. Your better off doing A/B testing than treating anything but the gospel as gospel.

How about any of Edward Tufte's books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, etc?

The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clark

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

The Informant - Kurt Eichenwald

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte

Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis

Take a look at Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte

All UI's are graphs at their heart

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information: Edward R. Tufte

Ways to Connect: On Interface and Product Design, Ryan Singer

Something on color theory

Design language books (Bauhaus, etc)

The entire Google design team has quite a few open resources: https://material.io/design/ and https://design.google

Figure 2 is misleading, but not intentionally so. See Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Graphics Press, 1983).

With all of the tools available now - some of which were mentioned in this writeup - it really puts into perspective the efforts Edward Tufte went through with his awesome books 10-30 years ago. I believe he said he spent into six figures just getting The Visual Display of Quantitative Information produced and out of the door.

Manipulating the scales on graphs is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It's one of the many deceitful practices that Edward Tufte talks about in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. In fact, in the chapter on "Graphical Integrity", he writes: "For many people the first word that comes to mind when they think about statistical charts is 'lie'."

If I were interested in investing in Twitter stock, I wouldn't be nearly as concerned with the growth of their user population as I'd be in the growth of their bottom line (profits). Oh, sorry, there are no profits.[1] As they say, "you can't make up losses on volume".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#IPO

Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book. He writes not about how to make your graphs look pretty, but how to display vast quantities of data and distill them down into useful graphics that communicate themselves effectively.

He provides examples of good and bad graphs, but more importantly, explains what exactly it is that makes those examples good and bad, and further generalizes it so you understand how to make good visualizations. If you don't want to shell out the money for it, it's probably at your library (remember those?).

Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information unless you have some background or are willing to learn about it -- it tends to be highly technical and is probably too complex for what you're trying to do. Basic stats might help you, but not as much as Tufte will.

Although I agree that people are poorly educated on presentation making I think the main reason they use PP is because of the 'I have a computer' syndrome. Tufte illustrates it perfectly in with 5 colors for 2 data points example in his "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". People would not recreate PP but abuse watever else they could find.

What is worse is that this syndrome is affecting high school students. At least here in Lima Peru, homework is demanded to be done in the computer because it is 'more professional'. So the minimum effort way copy and pasting becomes trivial. In the old way of pen a paper our inherit aversion to effort pushed the student to learn to summarize as writing more demanded more effort. I would prohibit high school homework to be done in the computer. But I digress.

No, it's not common to see this kind of visualisation. Bad visualisations? Yeah, they're pretty common. The usual mistake is overuse of Pie Charts.

I'd recommend the OP (and anyone else who has an interest in communication) to read:

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Visual-Display-Quantitative-Info...

Information Dashboard Design
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effecti...

Now You See
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-You-See-Stephen-Few/dp/097060198...

I think this might be in part due to Edward Tufte's philosophy, as especially described in his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information [1]. He uses "ink to data ratio" as a measure of the effectiveness of numerical charts. This superficially makes sense: why add more visual noise if it adds no more information? As an example, he suggesting shortening the axes on scatter plots to reflect the range of data in each dimension, which is a win-win: it adds more information and reduces ink. Boxes around objects and lines separating things are specifically called out as especially evil, since they add ink without contributing any information. I think this idea may have leaked from quantitative displays to general design.

The flaw of course is that more ink does not necessarily mean more visual noise. With the axes example, disconnecting them means that you now have two high-level visual objects rather than one, and the whole chart starts to looks like a mess of individual objects on the page. If you have several graphs next to each other then it's much easier to focus one and exclude the others if they're in boxes rather than having component objects floating indistinctly near each other. But Tufte only sees a count of black blobs of ink or black pixels, as if each one has its own mental cost.

As an aside, the book is still fantastic because it has loads of examples of unconventional charts and figures, and you can just ignore the text (or, better, read it skeptically). I found out about it from xkcd originally [2] and I suspect that many others did too.

[1] https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

[2] https://xkcd.com/124/

I've read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Tufte, and I think it would benefit you even though you are not talking about manually generating charts. For example, he talks about how it's easy to be misleading with a chart based on how you calibrate the axes, which is something you'd still need to do even with dynamically generated visualizations.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is one of my favorite books!

0 in this case is not really a relevant value (since that would mean transforming the input into something infinitely large). The functional identity value / origin here is 1x. Here's what that looks like [1].

To me, this is a significantly less useful image. But maybe that stems from a lot of comfort with both the subject matter and the detail log-log plots that I work with to evaluate zstd performance, e.g. [2].

[1] https://imgur.com/gU2Gdf6
[2] https://github.com/facebook/zstd/pull/1317#issuecomment-4260...

On that matter, I heartily recommend Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information": http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

Design is about communication, but it does not exclude ornamentation. Design can be ornamental (if the purpose of the resume is to highlight some design skill), however it should not reduce the readability of data as this one does.
Having just read "The visual display of quantitative information" I have this to say to the designer of the resume: remove non-data ink. Increase data density and readability. Especially readability.

I just borrowed "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Tufte.

"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is not a howto guide. It's not a list of 101 tips and tricks for drawing charts, where one would wish for 200 tips instead. It's a framework, a theory, of how to think and reason about visualizing information. It is something you can take and apply in many different situations. Then the question really is, is there anything wrong with the theory it conveys?

I bought one of his books (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) and now deeply regret it. If you are familiar with principles of design and with the aesthetic of minimalism, reading Tufte will gain you little knowledge and will feel like watching some self-proclaimed Don Quixote battle windmills.

My favorite part was where he tries to poo-poo modernist/contemporary architecture (why would one insert such an irrelevant/inflammatory opinion in the first place?). According to Tufte, it is better to superficially decorate a conventionally laid out building than to architect a radically new, untraditional form -- which only illustrates how out-of-touch the author is with contemporary trends. What a boring, self-aggrandising old prick.

"I'd love to see a graph, for instance."

Tufte in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information points out that the Wall Street Journal is one of the least likely newspapers to display anything in a graph. Indeed, it would be a lot easier for visually minded people like me to check the Journal's arguments if they were displayed in bivariate plots more often.

Check out Edward Tufte's books , from his webpage

"Edward Tufte has written seven books, including Beautiful Evidence, Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Data Analysis for Politics and Policy. He writes, designs, and self-publishes his books on analytical design, which have received more than 40 awards for content and design. He is Professor Emeritus at Yale University, where he taught courses in statistical evidence, information design, and interface design. His current work includes landscape sculpture, printmaking, video and a new book."

Always go back to the classics

* The Design of Everyday Things
* Design for the Real World
* A Pattern Language
* Notes on the Synthesis of Form
* Never Leave Well Enough Alone
* Don't Make Me Think
* How Things Don't Work
* Usable Usability
* The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
* A Theory of Fun for Game Design

Other left-field books I've found myself going back to for design inspiration more than I would've thought

* The Death and Life of Great American Cities
* The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
* Influence by Robert Caldini
* Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
* The Art of Looking Sideways
* Cosmos
* Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
* The Theory of Moral Sentiments

And just specifically for computer UX, Smashing UX Design is a pretty good crash course.

If I had to expand my list, I would include:

"Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman
"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte
"Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug

Tufte will give you the vocabulary around visual concepts. Norman will give you the vocabulary around evaluating basic usability. Krug will apply both to the domain of the web.

Additional recommendations:
About Face 3.0 -- written by the head of Cooper Design, it outlines in somewhat dry fashion the frontiers of user experience process. Buy this only if you're desperately interested in becoming an interaction designer, or you want to institute user-centered design in your organization. It's really the UCD bible.

Have you checked out the handful of books listed on the YCombinator "Startup Library" page (http://ycombinator.com/lib.html)?:

Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends and Influence People

Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters

Jessica Livingston: Founders at Work

Learn to wireframe and sketch out your websites ahead of time. It is much easier to try ten different layouts on paper than starting them in css. Some people like to mockup in photoshop, but I prefer paper. It is just faster for me.

Some people already mentioned "Non-Designers Design Book" - Robin Williams

Some other good ones are:

"Design of Everyday Things" - Donald Norman (Conceptual, but gets you in the right mindset)

"Dont Make me Think" - Steve Krug (Usability matters)

"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" - Edward Tufte (he has a set of 4 books on information visualization, all of which are good)

One of the key concepts that I've taken from these books is that everything in a page has a visual weight so you must consider how everything in a page balances out together. Never add stuff just for the sake of adding it, because it will distract the user from the information they are trying to gather.

And most of all just build more websites and try to improve each one. Design is still a lot like programming. If you dont like the particular look of your site you can refactor it. I know you don't get the benefit of seeing it, but some of the best designed sites out there have gone through multiple iterations.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is one of my all time favourites, though it hasn't been as influential as it should have been.

It's sitting proudly behind me next to The Mythical Man Month, the GOF book, the Dragon book, Refactoring, Code Complete and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

I was just reading in "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte and interestingly there is the same crescent visible in his cancer maps.

It is most pronounced in "All types of cancer, white males; age adjusted rate by country, 1950-1969" on page 17 (second edition of the book).

I don't see it in the corresponding (all types of cancer) map for females, but with a bit of squinting it might be visible in the lung cancer maps for both white males and females.

Unfortunately the book has only the maps for whites.

At the risk of being seriously down-voted in a Hacker dominated community, please read the following:

Not a designer? Here’s how to make your web apps look awesome

A) Please hire a designer. You might hire someone who is not very costly and fits your budget but I cannot over emphasize the value someone who does this day in day out brings to the table.

OR

B) If you were a designer and wanted to build something, what would you do? Use one of the million ready made coding junks like "Digg Template" or "Twitter template"? No you know very well that innovation does not work that ways. You would pick up a book and learn to program or find someone who knows it and will help you.

Just because "everybody" thinks they can design or make things "look" good, it does not mean it is design. Read a few books like the following to get started:

1)The Design Of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman, Don Norman (basics of design)

2)Visual Grammar by Christian Leborg (basics of visual design)

3)Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works by Erik Spiekermann (typography)

4)Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach To Web Usability by Steve Krug (basics of UX)

5)Understanding Comics by Scott Mccloud (basics of storytelling- useful in web interfaces too)

6)The Visual Display Of Quantitative Informations by Edward R. Tufte (useful in information design and dashboards)

If you have read them and want to learn more, please feel free to contact via my HN Profile.

I recommend reading "The Visual Display of Quantitive Information" by Tufte. I would have partially agreed with you before, but I really do think that correct visualisation of data can make it vastly more useful, and as a few other commenters have noted, Uber has a big challenge to differentiate themselves from Lyft and others, and effective use of data could well be one of their differentiators.

Edward Tufte gives the pie chart a more succinct and decisive treatment in "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information":

  A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart; the
  only worse design than a pie chart is several of them, for 
  then the viewer is asked to compare quantities located in 
  spatial disarray both within and between charts [...] Given 
  their low density and failure to order numbers along a     
  visual dimension, pie charts should never be used.

With some additional discussion on his website: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

For example, say I ran a command to show disk space usage. Perhaps I would like to pipe the output into a d3 visualisation and see it directly within the terminal without context switching. Why shouldn't I be allowed to do this?

Have you read "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte? Text isn't the best representation of all types of data.

Imagine also that I wanted to represent a table of data within an Excel style spreadsheet. This could be useful as it could define affordances for a user such as the ability to select rows and columns, and to sort or filter in realtime.

I offer you a few gateway drugs:

— The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by E. R. Tufte;

— The Elements of Typographic Design by R. Bringhurst;

— The Design of Everyday Things by D. Norman;

— Don't Make Me Think! by S. Krug.

Beware of Tufte. Using charts to abduct engineers into the world of design is just dirty.

It turns out that Tufte developed the content for "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" while at Princeton.

Although he did self-publish the book later at his own (considerable) expense, where do you think the money Princeton paid him all those years came from?

If you consistently apply Swartz's idea here, Tufte is in the wrong for charging for work that taxpayers helped fund. But I have a different take: Swartz's idea is bogus.

"In 1975, while at Princeton, Tufte was asked to teach a statistics course to a group of journalists who were visiting the school to study economics. He developed a set of readings and lectures on statistical graphics, which he further developed in joint seminars he subsequently taught with renowned statistician John Tukey, a pioneer in the field of information design. These course materials became the foundation for his first book on information design, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.[5][6]

After difficult negotiations with mainline publishers failed, Tufte decided to self-publish Visual Display in 1982, working closely with graphic designer Howard Gralla. He financed the work by taking out a second mortgage on his home. The book quickly became a commercial success and secured his transition from political scientist to information expert.[5]"

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte

I posted this in the comments of the blog yesterday but it hasn't been approved yet, I imagine there are a lot of comments to get through. Please excuse the second person singular grammar, I'm copying this straight from the notes app on my phone:

Your last two points I agree with, but given they are optional and can be switched off I think those criticisms are not only misplaced but suggest a sense of entitlement similar to the designer's arrogance you bemoan.

On your first point though you are simply wrong.  The thing you incorrectly call 'visual texture' is actually clutter.  

The borders for individual table rows are superfluous as the baseline of the text draws that line regardless. Additional borders duplicate these baselines and demand that a user reads twice as many visual elements in order to interpret an interface.  

The same is true for coloured backgrounds.   If a distinction of utility has already been inferred by shape and proximity then to add an additional visual cue adds little more than another layer of complexity.  This is unnecessary visual information that a user has to decode.  Time that could be better spent performing the tasks they've actually come to the app to do.

I'd suggest having a read of Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information to get a better grasp on these concepts.

One of the slides in the WP story credits Edward Tufte, who has written and published an essay on the subject, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" [1]. This, along with his seminal text "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" [2] are great reads, and I think should be required reading for anyone who has to present anything, technical or otherwise.

[1] http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp

[2] http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

Recently finished The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte and How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. I would have been embarrassed to have been caught reading the latter given the subject matter, despite how influential he's been on how I think about food, but it was a real insightful treat.

Currently reading The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South and Safe Area Goražde, a comic book about the Bosnian War.

Also reading Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy in between books, but that's a book I'll never really finish.

If you've not already found it, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte (Graphics Press, 1991) talks a lot about the representation of graphical train schedules by the slope of a line between stations; the intersection of two lines on the graph shows the time and place where two trains meet going in opposite directions. This was in the nineteenth century.