Folks,

Here is another great episode … honestly I think it’s one of the best we have ever recorded (-Enrico). We talk about color, and color – you know … it’s huge. To get some help we invited Gregor Aisch from Driven By Data and asked him to talk about his experience with color and his super useful library chroma.js.

We have to apologize for a number of things. The episode came out late, the quality is not super high and we have no transcribed chapters this time. No worries, this won’t happen again (or too often) and we have no intention to neglect DS. Moritz has been traveling and taking days off in beautiful Greece and Enrico was just having another baby.

Update: Useful color tools suggested by some of you

• http://www.colourlovers.com/
• http://kuler.adobe.com/ (love this!)
• http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/ColorTool.php

Update: Here is the chapter list! We just could not let such a great episode go without proper chapter marks…

[00:00] Intro: Today with Gregor Aisch from http://driven-by-data.net
[02:04] Computational Visualistics
[03:32] Today’s topic: Color
[03:46] Family drama interlude
[04:08] Colors: Powerful, but tricky to get right
[04:50] Color perception
[09:55] Color spaces
[15:39] Colors for categorical data
[17:20] What’s the maximum number of categorical colors to be used?
[19:40] Equidistance
[20:15] Colorbrewer
[23:13] chrome.js
[25:56] Colors for continuous data
[26:41] Mo’s six word advice
[27:04] Color for continuous data – usually not advisable
[30:14] Rainbow scales
[30:48] …and how to avoid them
[33:17] Color is difficult
[35:07] More tips on how to do it right
[37:29] Is there a method behind ugly visualization in science?
[38:58] Paper: Evaluation of artery visualizations
[42:39] How to deal with skewed distributions
[46:19] Learn about the data, highlight the interesting insights
[48:12] Redundant encoding and interaction between visual variables
[51:13] Use for secondary dimensions, or small number of categories
[52:57] Mo’s tips
[54:04] Don’t forget the legend
[54:34] Gregor’s tips
[56:07] Above all, do no harm.
[56:43] Enrico’s tips
[58:27] Wrapping it up

And stay tuned for another episode soon! We will have Jeff Heer on board! If you have any questions for him add a comment below or send us an email (see address in the right).

Take care and have fun!

Enrico and Moritz.

Related episodes

• Datawrapper with Lisa C. Rost and Gregor Aisch