Top 50 Edward Tufte Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Only drug dealers and software companies call their customers ‘users’”

— Edward Tufte

2. “Simple design, intense content.”

— Edward Tufte

Featured in: Simplicity Quotes, Design Quotes

3. “Above all else show the data.”

— Edward Tufte

Featured in: Statistics Quotes

4. “If the statistics are boring, you’ve got the wrong numbers.”

— Edward Tufte

5. “Design cannot rescue failed content.”

— Edward Tufte

Featured in: Design Quotes

6. “Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.”

— Edward Tufte

7. “Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.”

— Edward Tufte

8. “The world is generally multivariate.”

— Edward Tufte

9. “If you’re told what to look for, you can’t see anything else.”

— Edward Tufte

10. “An open mind but not an empty head.”

— Edward Tufte

11. “Good design is clear thinking made visible, bad design is stupidity made visible.”

— Edward Tufte

12. “Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity – rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding.”

— Edward Tufte

13. “In general, I think audiences are a lot smarter than people think. So, it’s not “know your audience”, it’s “respect your audience, and really know your content”.”

— Edward Tufte

14. “PowerPoint is like being trapped in the style of early Egyptian flatland cartoons rather than using the more effective tools of Renaissance visual representation.”

— Edward Tufte

15. “Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.”

— Edward Tufte

16. “If you like overheads, you’ll love PowerPoint.”

— Edward Tufte

17. “PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play – very loud, very slow, and very simple.”

— Edward Tufte

18. “Beautiful Evidence is about the theory and practice of analytical design.”

— Edward Tufte

19. “There are many true statements about complex topics that are too long to fit on a PowerPoint slide.”

— Edward Tufte

20. “Design isn’t crafting a beautiful, textured button with breathtaking animation. It’s figuring out if there’s a way to get rid of the button altogether.”

— Edward Tufte

21. “The essential test of design is how well it assists the understanding of the content, not how stylish it is.”

— Edward Tufte

22. “It is not how much empty space there is, but rather how it is used. It is not how much information there is, but rather how effectively it is arranged.”

— Edward Tufte

23. “The minimum we should hope for with any display technology is that it should do no harm.”

— Edward Tufte

24. “A metaphor for good information design is a map. Hold any diagram against a map and see how it compares.”

— Edward Tufte

25. “I was writing a chapter of Beautiful Evidence on the subject of the sculptural pedestal, which led to my thinking about what’s up on the pedestal – the great leader.”

— Edward Tufte

26. “Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information.”

— Edward Tufte

27. “Make all visual distinctions as subtle as possible, but still clear and effective.”

— Edward Tufte

28. “The leading edge in evidence presentation is in science; the leading edge in beauty is in high art.”

— Edward Tufte

29. “Clutter is not a property of information. Clutter is a failure of design.”

— Edward Tufte

30. “The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly – to develop strategies of seeing and showing.”

— Edward Tufte

31. “If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t make them relevant.”

— Edward Tufte

32. “The most common user action on a Web site is to flee.”

— Edward Tufte

33. “The best graphics are about the useful and important, about life and death, about the universe. Beautiful graphics do not traffic with the trivial.”

— Edward Tufte

34. “Here’s the general theory: To clarify, add detail. Imagine that. To clarify, add detail. And clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don’t start throwing out information, instead fix the design.”

— Edward Tufte

35. “Great design is not democratic; it comes from great designers. If the standard is lousy, then develop another standard.”

— Edward Tufte

36. “What is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and the difficult – that is, revelation of the complex.”

— Edward Tufte

37. “Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.”

— Edward Tufte

38. “What this means is that we shouldn’t abbreviate the truth but rather get a new method of presentation.”

— Edward Tufte

39. “The idea is that the content is the interface, the information is the interface, not computer-administrative debris.”

— Edward Tufte

40. “My father worked for governments all his life as an engineer and public works director.”

— Edward Tufte

41. “The world is much more interesting than any one discipline.”

— Edward Tufte

42. “My idea here is that, inasmuch as certain cognitive tasks and principles are tied to nature’s laws, these tasks and principles are indifferent to language, culture, gender, or the particular mode of information that is provided.”

— Edward Tufte

43. “The point of the essay is to change things.”

— Edward Tufte

44. “A practical part of my teaching is to provide demonstrative, hands-on experiences.”

— Edward Tufte

45. “It is straightforward for me to be ethical, responsible, and kind-hearted because I have the resources to support that.”

— Edward Tufte

46. “What gets left out is the narrative between the bullets, which would tell us who’s going to do what and how we’re going to achieve the generic goals on the list.”

— Edward Tufte

47. “That is to say, nature’s laws are causal; they reveal themselves by comparison and difference, and they operate at every multivariate space, time point.”

— Edward Tufte

48. “The idea of trying to create things that last-forever knowledge-has guided my work for a long time now.”

— Edward Tufte

49. “I think it is important for software to avoiding imposing a cognitive style on workers and their work.”

— Edward Tufte

50. “The goal is to provide analytical tools that will last students a lifetime.”

— Edward Tufte