[8] Tufte was hired in 1967 by the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University as a lecturer in politics and public affairs, where he steadily moved up to the rank of full Professor in 1972.

[12] After negotiations with major publishers failed, Tufte decided to self-publish the book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information in 1982, working closely with graphic designer Howard Gralla.

But it is wrong to distort the data measures—the ink locating values of numbers—in order to make an editorial comment or fit a decorative scheme.

Tufte suggests these macro/micro readings be presented in the space of an eye-span, in the high resolution format of the printed page, and at the unhurried pace of the viewer's leisure.

These include John Snow's cholera outbreak map, Charles Joseph Minard's Carte Figurative, early space debris plots, Galileo Galilei's Sidereus Nuncius, and Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

[17] In Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo presents the nightly observations of the moons of Jupiter in relation to the body itself, interwoven with the two-month narrative record.

Tufte's analysis of a NASA PowerPoint slide is included in the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s report -- including an engineering detail buried in small type on a crowded slide with six bullet points, that if presented in a regular engineering white paper, might have been noticed and the disaster prevented.

Tufte believes that this is the most efficient method of transferring knowledge from the presenter to the audience and then the rest of the meeting is devoted to discussion and debate.

[citation needed] Sparklines are a condensed way to present trends and variation, associated with a measurement such as average temperature or stock market activity, often embedded directly in the text; for example: The Dow Jones index for February 7, 2006 .

[citation needed][23] Beyond his academic endeavors over the years, Tufte has created sculptures, often large outdoor ones made of metal or stone,[6] that were first primarily exhibited on his own rural Connecticut property.