Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

Clutter is not an attribute of information, clutter is a failure of design...fix the design rather than stripping all the detail out of the map.

There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design. If something is cluttered and/or confusing, fix your design.

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.

A practical part of my teaching is to provide demonstrative, hands-on experiences.

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 minimum we should hope for with any display technology is that it should do no harm.