Respect the Audience: A Tenet of Design

Whilst listening to one of the videos played in my Information design class today, the 2nd of February, 2024, Edward Tufte, a profound name in the world of Infographics mentioned the statement "RESPECT your Audience", which is a bit different from the ubiquitous notion of "KNOWING your Audience". Why did this pique my interest you might ask, it is simply replacing of a word with another to portray the same meaning, but, I must beg to differ in this case and paint a clear picture of the difference between these two statements.

Tom, Dick and Harry
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0476888/

Let's take a look at "Knowing your Audience", this involves of course doing the due diligence of finding out who your audience is in much detail as possible - their demographic data (age, job, gender...), and other forms of segmentation that could be used to single out these populace from the multitude. This seems enough, or should I say this is usually enough, but it still sort of restricts your audience to some general dude out there that has been identified - A person we do not necessarily care about or have any form of regard for, asides from that induced by the needs of the client. 

Official portrait of Queen Elizabeth II before the start of her 1959 tour, wearing the Vladimir Tiara, the Queen Victoria Jubilee Necklace, the blue Garter Riband, Badge and Garter Star and the Royal Family Orders of King George V and King George VI

"Respecting your audience" though takes this a bit further, in that, there is a level of reverence injected into the formula, which drives a much meticulous attitude towards satisfying this group. A way to visualise this is to consider your first known audience as a group of Toms, Dicks and Henrys out there, and the "Respected" audience to be say the Queen of England (or anyone you respect), taking any design task as such places an extra weight on the shoulders of the designer as a result of the authority of the intended user, a great amount of attention is thus given to the final product than would have on a basic basis of knowing your audience.