Here’s a fun interview with Edward Tufte, insult comic and author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Here are a couple of his snappy retorts:

…highly produced visualizations look like marketing, movie trailers, and video games and so have little inherent credibility for already skeptical viewers, who have learned by their bruising experiences in the marketplace about the discrepancy between ads and reality (think phone companies)…

…overload, clutter, and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. So if something is cluttered, fix your design, don’t throw out information. If something is confusing, don’t blame your victim — the audience — instead, fix the design. And if the numbers are boring, get better numbers. Chartoons can’t add interest, which is a content property. Chartoons are disinformation design, designed to distract rather than inform. Thus they reduce the credibility of your presentation. To distract, hire a magician instead of a chartoonist, for magicians are honest liars…

Sensibly-designed tables usually outperform graphics for data sets under 100 numbers. The average numbers of numbers in a sports or weather or financial table is 120 numbers (which hundreds of million people read daily); the average number of numbers in a PowerPoint table is 12 (which no one can make sense of because the ability to make smart multiple comparisons is lost). Few commercial artists can count and many merely put lipstick on a tiny pig. They have done enormous harm to data reasoning, thankfully partially compensated for by data in sports and weather reports. The metaphor for most data reporting should be the tables on ESPN.com. Why can’t our corporate reports be as smart as the sports and weather reports, or have we suddenly gotten stupid just because we’ve come to work?

It’s a very interesting point, actually, that people are willing to look at very complex data on sports sites, really study it and think about it, and do that voluntarily, considering it fun rather than boring, hard work. It’s child-like in a way – I mean in a positive sense, that for children the world is fresh and new and learning is fun. What is the secret of not shutting down this ability in adults. I think it’s context.