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As a color blind person, a lot of his "better" suggestions were absolutely impossible to discern to me, while his "worse" examples were fine. I wish more peopl

As a color blind person, a lot of his "better" suggestions were absolutely impossible to discern to me, while his "worse" examples were fine. I wish more people made visualizations based on brightness rather than a hue scale.

moron4hire 6y ago
*her
joshvm 6y ago
These are called perceptually uniform colormaps and are also useful for grayscale printing, as the scale will still be valid. This is now the default in Matplotlib (eg viridis, magma, etc) https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/10/16/how-bad-is-your-colormap/ https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/10/16/how-bad-is-your-co... I have found occasion to use Jet though, it's good for highlighting transitions between close values when the colour scale is large (but not large enough to use a log map).
- Daub 6y ago
  FYI... the easiest way to get colour pairs that feature this sort of perceptual uniformity is by using a Lab color picker, such as Photoshop's. Much better that just shifting the hue slider in RGB space.
neilk 6y ago
I noticed that too. The stricture “get it right in black and white” would help, but color-blind folks map colors to lightnesses differently. A color-blind co-worker believed yellow on white was perfectly legible, but a scatterplot with red and blue was indecipherable. Do color blind folks have any tools, like browser plugins, to remap images?
- wereHamster 6y ago
  Chrome DevTools has a builtin feature to simulate various color deficiencies: https://twitter.com/mathias/status/1237393102635012101 https://twitter.com/mathias/status/1237393102635012101
  - dkersten 6y ago
    Thanks for this! Very interesting. I just tried it on the article and, sure enough, the "better" version of the first circles, a number of them do, indeed, look the same when emulating any vision deficiency except blurred vision while they are perfectly discernible in the "not ideal" versions.
matonias 6y ago
Just that the title says they are mistakes, does not mean they really are. I think his 'worse' examples where a lot better from a color balance perspective. Sometimes over-engineering gets you no where.
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  From experience: The only thing I agree with on the "do not use the basic colors", is that some C-level stakeholder 5 forwarded emails down the road (and never present on the status calls), will not bother to read the damn thing fully, and will see the RED on statistic-X and will think that the X-thing is doomed and we need to slash this project/product/function. Yes, I agree, it's not a color thing, it's a RTFpresentation-thing. But the use of non-standard colors (red-amber/yellow-green) will avoid these mishaps.
chobytes 6y ago
Yeah, I was thinking this was going to be an article about making colors easier to see for colorblind people... but it actually appears to be the opposite. Having some degree color blindness is extremely common. Its depressing how designers just refuse to take this into account.

moron4hire 6y ago

*her

joshvm 6y ago

These are called perceptually uniform colormaps and are also useful for grayscale printing, as the scale will still be valid. This is now the default in Matplotlib (eg viridis, magma, etc) https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/10/16/how-bad-is-your-colormap/ https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/10/16/how-bad-is-your-co... I have found occasion to use Jet though, it's good for highlighting transitions between close values when the colour scale is large (but not large enough to use a log map).

Daub 6y ago
FYI... the easiest way to get colour pairs that feature this sort of perceptual uniformity is by using a Lab color picker, such as Photoshop's. Much better that just shifting the hue slider in RGB space.

neilk 6y ago

I noticed that too. The stricture “get it right in black and white” would help, but color-blind folks map colors to lightnesses differently. A color-blind co-worker believed yellow on white was perfectly legible, but a scatterplot with red and blue was indecipherable. Do color blind folks have any tools, like browser plugins, to remap images?

wereHamster 6y ago
Chrome DevTools has a builtin feature to simulate various color deficiencies: https://twitter.com/mathias/status/1237393102635012101 https://twitter.com/mathias/status/1237393102635012101
- dkersten 6y ago
  Thanks for this! Very interesting. I just tried it on the article and, sure enough, the "better" version of the first circles, a number of them do, indeed, look the same when emulating any vision deficiency except blurred vision while they are perfectly discernible in the "not ideal" versions.

matonias 6y ago

Just that the title says they are mistakes, does not mean they really are. I think his 'worse' examples where a lot better from a color balance perspective. Sometimes over-engineering gets you no where.

HenryBemis 6y ago
From experience: The only thing I agree with on the "do not use the basic colors", is that some C-level stakeholder 5 forwarded emails down the road (and never present on the status calls), will not bother to read the damn thing fully, and will see the RED on statistic-X and will think that the X-thing is doomed and we need to slash this project/product/function. Yes, I agree, it's not a color thing, it's a RTFpresentation-thing. But the use of non-standard colors (red-amber/yellow-green) will avoid these mishaps.

chobytes 6y ago

Yeah, I was thinking this was going to be an article about making colors easier to see for colorblind people... but it actually appears to be the opposite. Having some degree color blindness is extremely common. Its depressing how designers just refuse to take this into account.