Anybody a member of his data-logging website, http://www.daytum.com/? I submitted myself for a beta invitation.

Just keep in mind getting past readability isn’t always just a matter of training, like reading subtitles for 3 hours.

Sometimes it is just biology. Witness how when Time printed their List Issue they got a calvacade of mail complaning that the Lists couldn’t be read by their 60 year old eyes.

1. The response “this doesn’t work for me” totally works for me. I try continually to increase my pain tolerance for media that I can’t easily access (long b&w foreign films, for instance) but there’s only so much time I can donate to inaccessible media. I’m sure the same is true for many of the commenters here.

2. Kevin misapprehends Tufte, frankly. Very few designers set black text on a white field. Most sites (even the blog template you’re reading right now) put off-black text (#333 instead of #000000, for instance) on an off-white field – grey on grey – because it’s softer than 100% contrast. We can differ on percentages here. That’s cool. Saying, “the difference in contrast is too low to read,” for example, is a perfectly reasonable critique, but criticizing a piece for its “white on grey” says more about the critic than the piece. Namedropping Tufte doesn’t change that.

3. We ought to at least nod to the difficulty of designing for print and screen simultaneously. I’m buying, like, seven copies of this thing, and I expect the print resolution will make better work of a small font and a small difference in contrast.

4. More fuel for the inaccessibility fire: Felton has gone positively, deliriously nuts with this year’s edition. He aggregates Grand Theft Auto IV miles into his driving statistics, for one lunatic example, and his cover infodesign, for another, is some variation on Serpienski’s triangle though I can’t for the life of me figure out what any of it means.

Which is at least some of the fun of it for me. This is his personal annual report. He owes nothing to a corporate board. He owes nothing to shareholders. This has liberated him from the stuffy confines of Excel graphwork. He wanders too far from the reservation for my tastes on several occasions, but I rather love watching him find and flail with his new infographic toys.

“ACT AS IF”

No one argued for grey on grey.

Incidentally, I still have no idea what the picture here is about. It seems to be a collection of random words and numbers. Perhaps there is some unreadable fine print that explains what it all means, but the overall effect is noise.