In general, I think audiences are a lot smarter than people think. So, it's not "know your audience", it's "respect your audience, and really know your content".

The world is much more interesting than any one discipline.

That is to say, nature's laws are causal; they reveal themselves by comparison and difference, and they operate at every multivariate space, time point.

We've drifted into this presentation mode without realizing the cost to the content and the audience in the process.

The essential test of design is how well it assists the understanding of the content, not how stylish it is.

Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding.

Clutter is not a property of information. Clutter is a failure of design.