In the early 1970s, the editors of the Harvard Business Review received a critical letter from Edward Tufte, scolding its design director—me—as basically incompetent in designing intelligent diagrams for the journal’s audience. He introduced himself as an expert and included his book as an example of good design. It was the first edition of the Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which itself was pretty conservative and in a cool scientific vein. It lacked styling and any high quality experimental typography. His message was not yet aimed at the graphic design community, which soon became his most devoted audience. The first edition was meant for number-strategists and crunchers, and statisticians working in political, social, and economic disciplines.  

It is interesting that nobody has risen to question his run for the money, most likely, because it does not really matter. In the study of statistics, the aesthetic visual presentation stands not in the center of research, as the explication of meaningful assumption, conjecture, and critical analyses are. Granted, how a research result is packaged and made intelligible for public dissemination and consumption may have some true importance, but not to the statistician as primary researcher. When it comes to Tufte’s communication design audience, very few author the contents and select the context for the presentation of their information diagrams. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information was still straight forward and did not yet exude much visual charm. Tufte’s Envisoning Information, however, seemed to have remedied that aspect. So, after nearly fifty years of having listened to Mr. Tufte’s sermon, have designers improved The Visual Display of Quantitative Information or has it stayed pretty much in the same mode it has always been, namely when good efforts are made, good solutions are found?

The upshot of his letter was, an editorial board meeting summoned me to defend my design approach. My argument was very simple. Tufte had taken advantage of holdings in Special Collections of the Yale Libraries, aided, I am sure, by a very knowledgable librarian, because at that time few gained access to Yale’s hidden treasures. For a short time, Tufte had the monopoly on holding the famous diagram illustrating Napoleon’s attack on Russia and his devastating military retreat after his defeat. The question was always, could Tufte come up with dozens more equally strong and convincing diagrams? Since he focused on statistics, would he ever open up to other information domains outside of statistics? Walter Herdeg had published the Graphis book on information graphics, which included many more, and Richard Saul Wurman had already presented his ways of visualizing information in terms of population density diagrams, maps, and other process diagrams. Would Tufte ever deal with anything more poetic, abstract, or meaningful than statistics?

There are clues to all of Tufte’s bravura. In an article in a California newspaper, Tufte is quoted claiming that the book is still the most efficient way to present information. He had already missed Google Maps, which in seconds can provide access to pretty accurate information on the smallest of villages in the Western world, proving him wrong. My argument was and still is, what if all the scientific discoveries by Newton, Leipnitz, or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, instead of being compressed to the two-dimensional page, were allowed to unfold in four dimensions. Would there be not a great chance that much of what has been revealed by history would have to be challenged,  revised and improved? Tufte is not only an author, he is also a book seller and likes to hold on to his meal ticket.

Tufte’s diagram was to revolutionize the approach to statistical information. I liked the diagram myself, but realized that it lacked complexity in relationship to the demands of Harvard professors, who, as subject matter experts, rarely allowed changes to their support materials. The reasons were simple as they were human. Many of their diagrams were developed for their dissertations and accepted by the academic tenure committees as proof of fidelity. Others had been used on lecture circuits and workshops—like Tufte’s—and had become more than just diagrams, but visual expressions and identities of their ideological personalities.

The biggest problem in relationship to Tufte’s arrogant analysis was that many of the HBR diagrams had nothing to do with statistics. Most represented hierarchical decision trees, decision flow diagrams, chronological tables, production flow diagrams, and communication networks. Statistics were relegated to pie and bar charts. At HBR, an editorial committee decided which of the diagrams were included with the article, or which were too convoluted or hard to decipher by the readership, and which were not informative. In my nearly fifteen years of designing the prototypes for the magazine, HBR had never received complaint letters to the editor about the visual presentations of information. I must admit that frequently the inclusion of a diagram neither helped nor hindered the straight forward contents of the text.

I weathered the storm and my contract was renewed for another decade. Off and on, I was with HBR for about fourteen years, designing three distinctly different prototypes, and supervised their implication, from letterpress to digital typography. I followed Bradbury Thompson, who devoted himself to the major and first “design” prototype. I felt obligated to always keep his vision in mind. I wonder if Tufte and Thompson ever met. They lived on the same campus. If Tufte never took the opportunity to discuss the HBR layout with Thompson, this is a shame and shows a certain ignorance of the technical aspects of magazine production in a “letterpress” era.