Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
kylebgorman · 2013-07-27
· Original
thread
The difference between Cleveland and Tufte is that the former is "empirical" (he discusses lots of results from psychological studies on comprehension of graphics) rather than one man's opinion. Also, Cleveland actually has accomplished something other than scolding and praising.
Personally, I liked Cleveland's "Elements of Graphing Data" (http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Graphing-Data-William-Clevela...) better than "Visualizing Data", though they overlap a lot.
Cleveland worked at Bell Labs and his work is timeless and very practical. It isn't about artwork or making things look nice. It's about communicating information. I like to contrast his work with Tufte's. Tufte comes up with some nice stuff but I find it to be more art than science where the information is clearly sacrificed to ascetics. With visualizations I always ask myself, "Do you know more now about what is going on than you did before or is it just something nice to look at?" Way too often it's the latter.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Graphing-Data-William-Clevel...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Visualizing-Data-William-S-Cleveland/...