Status: either too early to tell or too late to change; Tufte on design consulting
Products under development "are in one of two states--either too early to tell or too late to change.''
He finished the book in 1982, after moving to Yale. No publisher would print it to his exacting standards. Tufte wanted the book to exemplify the design principles he articulated. It had to have lavish, abundant, high-resolution images and footnotes alongside the text so a reader wouldn't have to flip pages to find a reference. The book had to be printed on thick, creamy paper and sell for a reasonable price, about $30. "Publishers seemed appalled at the prospect that an author might govern design,'' he later wrote. So he took out a second mortgage at nearly 18 percent interest and produced the book himself.
---- Edward Rolf Tufte
Some longtime Tufte fans have responded with impatience. "Beautiful--but not on topic without stretching the imagination,'' Stephen Few, a consultant who specializes in data visualization, writes on the online Business Intelligence Network. Zach Gemignani, a founder of Juice Analytics, a data-consulting firm, says, "I wish that Tufte would focus more on the current state of information visualization in business today and encourage vendors to make better tools.''
But making better tools has never been Tufte's mission. His passion is fundamentals--the accuracy of expression and the wonder of the spectacle. And these sculptures, sitting on the grass or floating free in space, are wonderful spectacles. Changing with the shadows and the seasons, they grab a blade of grass, a buttercup, a mound of snow and reflect it back, transforming the familiar into an image to behold.