This is Edward Tufte. He is an information designer and he’s well regarded for his ability to visualise complex data sets in ways that people can easily understand. He’s also well known for his dislike of PowerPoint which is a bit ironic.
Like most properly famous people, he’s coined some well used phrases, and one of them is the ‘data:ink ratio’. In information design, you want to impart a lot of information (data) with as little ink as you can manage. Generally the less things there are to look at, the easier it will be to understand.
All screens are made up of millions of tiny dots called pixels. Being small, mobile screens have less of them. When you’re designing for mobile, you want to use as few pixels as possible to communicate as much information as you can.
Or, you want to optimise the data:pixel ratio. Thanks Edward Tufte.
2011-09-07 17:14:41