flowchart LR A(Tufte)<--- Few ---B(Bremer) B--- Lambrechts ---C(Scherer) C--- Stefaner ---D(IIB)
A collection of sites, books and articles containing useful examples, sage guidance, or inspiring concepts on a range of topics.1
Visualization
Tufte of course.
Stephen Few has a ton of great examples as well. His book Show Me the Numbers is a terrific resource for simplifying and communicating essential information for clarity and communicating clearly.
Nadieh Bremer combines compelling visuals with information graphics in ways that evoke emotion. More recently, she has worked on generative art.
Cedric Scherer provides a ton of useful guides and shares his work.
Information is Beautiful has a far different visualization philosophy than Tufte or Few, but offers some intriguing concepts. They also share a number of datasets to explore.
Design
Alex Retinart’s The Secret Law of Page Harmony
Systems Thinking
Bret Victor, especially the interactive essay Ladder of Abstraction
Optimization
Gerald Brown’s (NPS) papers on optimization tradecraft and formulating integer linear programs have proven extremely valuable.
Communication
Jean-luc Doumont provides clean direction on scientific and technical communication.
Bret Victor’s Scientific Communication as Sequential Art
Presentation
Duarte’s series of resources to level up in presenting and executive communication.
Garr Reynolds was one of the OG masters of presentation and storytelling. I certainly grew by learning from him. In fact, one of the biggest (and best) presentations I delivered was heavily influenced by his style.
Random
Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan. 2
Footnotes
A graph \(g\) is a set of nodes, \(n\) and edges, \(e\). ↩︎
Interestingly, in one of his books Taleb asks Benoit Mandelbrot “why finance?” Mandelbrot responded, “because that’s where the data is”. While my time at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory did not coincide with Mandelbrot’s, I would have liked to have met him.↩︎