Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Amazing book for information design
Comment: I am the type of person who dabbles in all kinds of design, and I think of the ideal designer as one who knows a little about everything. Designers design ways of output, whether it be lemon juice from a lemon or ways to fit all vital components in a laptop in the most efficient way. This book is about the output of information from our multidimensional world to the flat paper space, and he does it brilliantly.
It's even worth mentioning the book itself as a good piece of design. All the images are vivid, the pages feel crisp and durable, even the color of the pages I bet was an attention of detail (it's slightly offwhite, but in an extremely good way). It's like good ol' fashioned timeless design.
He covers the subject wide and far, dips into everything from visual illusions to hardcore information displays. Sometimes you wonder where the heck he gets all these wonderful images, they span from the stoneage till today and show the vast variety of ways to display information, both simple and complex.
It is a beautiful book and an absolute must for people interested in the design of information. Actually, I'd say it's a must for anyone interested in information at all, be it for powerpoint or for magazine layout. This will be one of the most intelligent books on my shelf.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: An Obsolete Glance At A Classic Problem
Comment: This is a short book, 126 pages. An interesting cursory exploration of the subject. However, it feels like it predates information technology (1990 predates the web by 5 years), and seems to have more in common with how to communicate elements of a hand-drawn map atlas if you were living in the 1700s than it has with using Adobe Illustrator to convey an idea for the web. I bought this book to see if it would help me as a web developer, and instead when it arrived I realized I got a weird coffee table book that feels like it was written in the 1960s, at the latest, to summarize that you can use different icons or pictographs of small size to communicate important ideas without words. (Sorry, I already gave away the story of the book.)
I know this review isn't going to get very popular marks, but, put simply, this book is probably good for professional or student pure designers, but it's useless for me. I honestly don't think the book targets web designers, but somebody here reviewed that it was "great" for web designers, so because of that remark I bought it. Sorry, but I don't see the applicability. But then, I only skimmed over the book before I put it back on Amazon Marketplace.
While one should normally never judge a book by its cover, in this case I think you should.
Customer Rating:
Summary: one of three or four
Comment: this is part of a series from tufte. he uses examples to describe techniques of visualization. if you do presentations to others or write reports that present complex data, several of his books should be in your library.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A wonderful book!
Comment: No designer should be without this book. I especially enjoy the historical accounts of information design. Of course hind sight is 20/20 so his redesigns seem obvious from our perspective.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An outstanding addition to my library
Comment: An outstanding addition to my library, Edward systematically explores the presentation of data showing the value of data rich content when it is properly displayed. After reading half the book, I couldn't sit through a presentation without coming up with at least 3 ways to improve it. The illustrations in the book are beautifully rendered and cover a diverse set of subject matter each as interesting as the next. The only topic concerning this book that I struggled with is whether or not to mark it up. In the end, as I do with all of my books I intend to refer back to, I did.
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