Sparklines are "intense word-sized graphics". From Tufte's upcoming book, Beautiful Evidence
There are 3 reader comments
• Mar 01 2004 • 6:59PM
I got home from his seminar in Boston about 5 minutes ago, where he talked a bunch about Sparklines and other interesting visuals from Beautiful Evidence. The course gave me some interesting ideas on how to distill information down to its essence and present it in a contextually appropriate way. I highly recommend his books, and his course if you can spare the time and money.
• Mar 02 2004 • 4:58PM
I worry that relying on inline graphics will remove a lot of easily searched semantic content from what would otherwise be plain text. Yes, this seems like a nice use of space, but it also means that someone(thing) has to actually generate all those little graphics, and plop them into the right places in a document.
If these actually take off, I'd like to see some sort of description language develop so that the graphics are generated on the fly rather than just existing as premade graphic files.
This thread is closed to new comments. Thanks to everyone who responded.
donald tetto • Mar 01 2004 • 1:44PM
These are, of course, incredible. How long until we see these in the daily paper?