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A good supplement to your Tufte texts. Should be a larger book--visuals are too small, and there doesn't appear to be a companion website.
Graphesis, at it’s most valuable, offers a deep dive into the history of visualization across disciplines, shining a light onto historic methods of visual explanation that hold up centuries later and have the potential to influence contemporary designers. Drucker also presents the concept of the "Knowledge Generator”: a valuable phrase that encapsulates an aspirational goal for information graphics. It would be easy to write an essay about this concept alone, so I won't say much about this, exce...
I've had a lot of trouble reviewing this book, because I don't entirely trust my assessment. It's a very thorough and rigorous book, on a subject that I think needs more extensive treatments, from a scholar with serious credibility in the field. I went so far as to look up other reactions, and they tended to be positive (always written by other academics, or grad students who were assigned the book, obviously). So please take all that under advisement when you read my criticism.Graphesis starts
Unnecessarily dense academic prose that hampers the digestion of an otherwise thought-provoking thesis about how humans engage with and understand visualizations of information.Unfortunately, a better writer will like take these ideas, present them more accessibly and then be celebrated for 'original' thinking.
Though the arguments wax rather philosophical and the language becomes (perhaps unnecessarily) academically dense in the lattermost third of the book or so, some very interesting ideas are presented by the author. The structure of the book itself is very well done, and while some of the ideas regarding graphical interfaces that Drucker presents may not have direct application in the face of present real-world constraints, simply understanding and considering them may help one rethink information...
I'll be sure to come back to this one in the near future. "Graphesis" is the perfect introduction into a topic I didn't realize I have such a strong interest in. Although for some it might be a bit too sparse and meandering, there were still some great unifying and thoughtful observations that held the book together, encouraging the reader to think beyond Drucker's immediately apparent topic in order to draw bigger questions about graphics/illustrations that connect the past with the present.
Good intro for theoretical grounding in history of data visualization. Rest of the book is highly detailed historical account and then interface analysis. It was too granular for what I was seeking, but it seems very thorough and has tons of useful illustrations.
Don't bring this book to the beach...unless you plan to get a helluva sun tan. As a small press publisher, I picked it up wanting to be more conversant about all aspects of book production, and that includes graphic design. I got way more than I bargained for, although my brain hurts now. Basically, Drucker argues that we are knee-deep into our screen-based and networked existence, clicking and swiping and linking happily as we go, but we don't think about how spatial conventions and graphic org...
I loved the very thorough and thoughtful historical overview and categorization (5 stars!). And wasn’t too keen on the vague, unstructured and very hard to understand second half (2 stars!). All in all: great book and then not.
