Escaping Flatland

Overview

The world is multivariate; paper and screen are not. Every image a maker shows a reader must live on a two-dimensional plane, so the central job of information design is to widen the resolving power of that plane — to raise both the number of dimensions it can carry and the density of data it packs per unit area. This is the opening, agenda-setting chapter of Envisioning Information: it states the problem, sets the two goals, previews the five methods that the rest of the book develops, and names the enemy — chartjunk and the architectural "duck," design that becomes its own content out of contempt for the data and the audience.

Read this skill for the framework and the chapter's gallery of worked examples. For the deep mechanics of each method, go to its dedicated sibling skill (named in §2). Do not treat the five methods as six "strategies" — density is a goal, not a method.

§1. The Flatland Problem

The term comes from Edwin A. Abbott's novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (London, 1884), about beings trapped in a two-dimensional world. Tufte's application: we navigate a three-space perceptual world and reason about higher dimensions with ease, yet every information display collapses onto the flatland of paper and screen.

"Escaping this flatland is the essential task of envisioning information." — Tufte, Envisioning Information

The toad image (chapter opener, p.14): when a toad sheds its skin, the suit leaves life's "spaceland" and collapses into flatland — exactly what our displays do to multivariate reality. The task is to do better than a flattened-out toad suit.

Why it gets harder: two forces compound the difficulty.