Einstein is often quoted as saying “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Last month, I went to a seminar given by Edward Tufte, author of “Beautiful Evidence” and “Envisioning Information” – books that serve as inspiration for many in the field of information visualization. While Einstein advocated for simplicity in describing the universe through mathematics, Tufte argues for allowing data to speak for itself by taking what might be called a minimalist approach to designing visualizations. At the seminar, I learned that Tufte has coined the term sparkline to refer to small yet data-rich line graphs like the following, which take this concept to its limit for one-dimensional time-varying data:
I thought that these sparklines might be an interesting way to represent data on the IMA Dashboard, and so I’m experimenting by bringing this nugget of wisdom to bear on a chart that I haven’t been very pleased with. Read the rest of this entry »
