I don&#x27;t really like the fetishizing of Tuft&#x27;s style.<p>If you actually read his books, what he actually does is present a mental model for what to take into account when designing. But his style isn&#x27;t meant to be the end-all of typesetting or data presentation! The books aren&#x27;t saying &quot;see, I made this design for the following reasons. Now everyone should emulate me!&quot; It&#x27;s just one solution in the realm of all good design solutions.<p>One example I would immediately point to would be ggplot2. A wonderful library in a lot of respects, but the defaults are absolutely horrendous!! The default grey background with white lines was just pulled from one of Tufts&#x27;s books without a second of thought b&#x2F;c these grey backgrounds are horrible waste of ink when printing and are actually chart-junk b.c most of the time you have a white background - for-instance in a powerpoint (&lt;- that was a funny b&#x2F;c Tuft hates powerpoint)<p>Here too, the cream colored background looks gorgeous on paper and just weird and out of place on a webpage.