Tufte Claude Skill

tufte-claude-skill

A Claude Code skill that turns "make me a chart" into a Tufte-compliant chart. Distilled from the three foundational books by Edward R. Tufte.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information 1983 · 2nd ed. 2001 pictures of numbers	Envisioning Information 1990 pictures of nouns	Visual Explanations 1997 pictures of verbs

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Install

Clone into your Claude Code skills directory:

git clone https://github.com/aref-vc/tufte-claude-skill.git ~/.claude/skills/tufte

That's it. Claude Code auto-loads the skill on next launch. To verify, run `/tufte` or ask Claude to "make a chart of anything."

To update later:

cd ~/.claude/skills/tufte && git pull

To uninstall:

rm -rf ~/.claude/skills/tufte

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The three books, distilled

Tufte gives the three-book taxonomy himself on page 9 of *Visual Explanations*:

• VDQI — how to depict data and enforce statistical honesty. The book that gave us data-ink ratio, chartjunk, lie factor, small multiples.
• EI — how to lay out information in space. Layering, micro/macro readings, color rules, escaping flatland.
• VE — how to show motion, causality, narrative. The smallest effective difference, parallelism, visual confections.

Together they yield the ten principles this skill applies.

The ten principles

1. Show the data. Above all else