I had the privilege of attending an Edward Tufte conference here in Portland. After the brain melt that is inherent in listening to or reading Tufte, I gathered my grey matter and compiled some thoughts on the day. One of our clients suggest that I distill this into a Top Ten list. Here it is:

1. There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design. Manage clutter by fixing the design. To clarify, ADD detail.
2. 90% of every screen should be content, NOT marketing, not including navigation. People generally don’t do a Google search for ‘pretty design’ or ‘marketing fluff.’
3. Get out of the dominance relationship with your audience—let them use their own cognitive styles. The way you gain credibility with your audience is your demonstrated mastery of detail. Make the design about the content, not the design.
4. The lower the resolution, the longer the meeting: clarity is key!
5. Show your information at once, adjacent in space, rather than stacked in time. Known in powerpoint as ‘one damn thing after another!’
6. Start with the interface design and at as high a resolution as possible and let that drive the process.
7. Reduce design variation to allow the viewer to concentrate on evidence variation.
8. Be aware that your presentation will stand or fall on the quality, credibility, and relevance of its content.
9. A good test for a design is whether or not it evokes responses tothe content.
10. Grand principles of design:

* Show comparisons
* Show causality
* Show more than 1 or 2 variables-serious problems are multivariate, show multivariate evidence
* Integrate word knowledge and image: use annotations to pieces of content to help interpretation
* Document everything and tell people about it: documentation is a quality control mechanism and determines credibility
* Be aware that a presentation stands or falls on the quality, integrity, and relevance of the content. Good design cannot salvage failed content. Science is a content-driven enterprise.
* Use small multiples
* Don’t Dequantify: Thinking and designing are as one.

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