Looking around on Edward Tufte's site, I was a bit surprised to find pixel fonts with hideous kerning on his front page:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index
(I'm talking about the captions on the smaller images below the motion blur dog; they basically read as "16 new pr ints by ed ward t ufte", etc.)
I'm not suggesting Tufte is a bad designer for having a couple of ugly captions, or anything like that (presumably he has someone else doing the actual Photoshop work for stuff like this). Rather my point is simply that when the expectations are very high -- he has a NYT quote on that same page calling him "the Leonardo da Vinci of data" -- this kind of tiny detail leaps out because poor typography is an example of how design mistakes can make it more difficult to convey information.
(I'm talking about the captions on the smaller images below the motion blur dog; they basically read as "16 new pr ints by ed ward t ufte", etc.)
I'm not suggesting Tufte is a bad designer for having a couple of ugly captions, or anything like that (presumably he has someone else doing the actual Photoshop work for stuff like this). Rather my point is simply that when the expectations are very high -- he has a NYT quote on that same page calling him "the Leonardo da Vinci of data" -- this kind of tiny detail leaps out because poor typography is an example of how design mistakes can make it more difficult to convey information.