A few years ago, I'm passed a handout at a meeting and unlike most of these boring pieces of paper you just doodle on the entire meeting, this had something to say to me. The charts were not your canned Microsoft Office creations, they were different. I listened to the presentation and learned something. After I asked the presenter to fill me in on his graphical kung fu. He told me that prior to working at nCircle, he taken a class from a dude named Edward Tufte and it changed his life. Later I would take the same class and experience the same transformation.

Edward Tufte (he goes by ET on his site's forum) is one of those amazing people who you just can't believe is alive during your period on earth. Everything you want to know about the guy is on his site so I'll just end here by listing his URL.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index

I attended one of his seminars a few years back and was hooked. As an attendant, he gives you all of his published books ( I hope this is still the case). It seems that he releases a book every 7 years or so. His latest was just released a few weeks back and being the geek that I am, I pre-ordered "Beautiful Evidence" and got it the first week they shipped.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_be

I'm not the only Tufte fan at nCircle. The majority of our developers have been to the seminar and his principals are always present at our design meetings. His course is starting up again and the schedule is posted on his site. I encourage any one who hasn't been to this one-day course to do it.

The last thing I will mention is a little bit of nCircle trivia. The risk performance lines in the v6.6 release were influenced by Tufte's Sparklines. These are small, high resolution graphics embedded among words: word-sized graphics that communicate performance over time. Grab ET's Beautiful Evidence and check out page 46 to see what I mean.

So many more concepts to apply, so little time.

--tk