Sells on Tufte
Chris Sells has a weblog entry about an Edward Tufte lecture he attended.
I saw Mr. Tufte a few years back and it sounds like he is sticking to pretty much the same story he was saying back then: good design is all about communication. I'm a big fan of that concept and the clean, crisp interface has certainly seen a popular resurgence recently. If you read his ideas about conveying task information for projects, you will never want to make a Gantt chart ever again.
The sparklines idea he talks about sounds interesting. External figures are very distracting and having a small display of the time variability of the data seems like a great idea. That would be a great feature in Word or PDF. Get to it Chris!