Tufte ups the price of admission

Seems like everyone knows about Edward Tufte these days (his workshop fee is now $380 per person. I recall seeing him here in Portland, Ore., not too many years ago for about half that price.) So, maybe it’s time for me to find a new visual communication guru – but he’s still way ahead of the pack on innovative information presentation and design strategy.

If you’ve read all of Tufte’s books at least twice, you might want to check out what James Elkins has to say on the subject. Worth reading:

• The object stares back: on the nature of seeing
  “Vision is forever incomplete and uncontrollable because it is used to shape our sense of what we are; what we see remakes us. We are not free to see as we please. Some things reshape us as we see them and others hold us utterly captive until they drive us out our of ourselves.”
• How to use your eyes
  “Our eyes are far too good for us; they show us so much that we can’t take it all in so we shut out most of the world and try to look at things as briskly and as efficiently as possible.”
•  The domain of images
  “Our choices in art history have to do with what we expect pictures to be, and how we assume that expression and history arise in some images and not in others.”