Colors (Ware) Flashcards
What are some pitfalls with Categorical Colors?
If you select colors that are similar to eachother, it can be difficult to tell them apart.
What must you always remember if you have colored text on a colored background?
[G4.2] Always ensure luminance contrast with the background.
What is luminance? (Hard question)
Luminance is a measurement of light energy weighted by the spectral sensitivity function of the human visual system.
Unlike lightness and brightness, luminance can be read out directly from a scientific measuring instrument.
If large areas are defined using nearly equiluminous colors, what can consider doing to help define shapes?
You can consider using thin border lines with large luminance differences (from the colors of the areas). (PP. 113)
Color names are always adjectives. What does this suggest?
That colors are perceived as ATTRIBUTES of objects.
Color is useless in a lot of real world examples. Can you name a few?
Color does not help us see shape from shading and thereby shape a lump of clay or bread dough.
Color does not help the hunter aim an arrow accurately..
Color does not help us use stereo- scopic depth to guide our hands when we reach out to grasp something
Since color can be perceived as an attribute, what is an example from our dashboard where color was an attribute?
Inbound and Outbound information.
When we were displaying Inbound data, we consistently used an orange color.
When we were displaying Outbound data, we consistently used an blue color.
If you’re using color saturation to encode numerical quantity, should higher quantity be greater or lower saturation?
Use greater saturation to represent greater numerical quantities. Avoid using a saturation sequence to encode more than three values.
Is Brown a mysterious color?
Yes! Brown is actually “one of THE MOST mysterious colors”.
If you want, you can read why below:
Whereas people talk about a light green or a dark green, a light blue or a dark blue, they do not talk about dark yellow. When colors in the vicinity of yellow and orange yellow are darkened, they turn to shades of brown and olive green. Unlike red, blue, and green, brown requires that there be a reference white somewhere in the vicinity for it to be perceived. Brown appears qualitatively different from orange yellow.
There is no such thing as an isolated brown light in a dark room, but when a yellow or yellowish orange is presented with a bright white surround, brown appears. The rele- vance to visualization is that, if color sets are being devised for the purposes of color coding—for example, a set of blues, a set of reds, a set of greens, and a set of yellows— in the case of yellows, brown may not be recognized as a set member.
What is Ware’s concept of Visual Salience?
He covers the cognitive processes that are activated when extracting information from graphics. In addition to this, he argues that these cognitive processes are not perfect and therefore a number design practices can be undertaken to improve the cognitive comprehension of these visualisations
(This is somewhat similar to the cognitive load part of Knaflic’s chapter on clutter elimination)
According to Ware, what are the four basic stages of data visualisation?
- The collection and storage of data,
- The preprocessing stage designed to transform the data into something that is easier to manipulate,
- Mapping from the selected data to a visual representation
- The human and perceptual cognitive system
Why do we use “Neutral” colors? What does this suggest?
We use neutral colors (Not negative, not positive) in order to induce to the viewer the fact that one does not imply a better performance, as they both represent deviations in truckloads and the presence of empty runnings.
What does Ware suggest doing to represent routes?
He encourages the use of lines to represent paths and linear geographic features.
