Subtleties of Color by Robert Simmon
The use of color to display data is a solved problem, right? Just pick a palette from a drop-down menu (probably either a grayscale ramp or a rainbow), set start and end points, press “apply,” and you’re done. Although we all know it’s not that simple, that’s often how colors are chosen in the real world. As a result, many visualizations fail to represent the underlying data as well as they could.
Within the reading, Subtleties of Color, Robert Simmon touches upon the difference between the way we see color versus the way computers sees color. Though computers reads color in a linear way, our eyes can not perceive it like so because some colors look brighter to us than others. Thus, there are ways that people have organized color to allow for us to view it as a progression even though computers see them differently. This is very important especially in terms of representing data as colors are often used to represent or draw attention to something. Having control over how people perceive the colors allows for better visualization methods as well as representation.
In reading, Robert Simmon shows a variety of relationships between colors and human. We invent computers to help us to analyze colors. Before we have computers, we mostly use our intuition to distinguish colors. Most of color selections are inspired from nature and the environment around us. These selections may not be accurate but usually can be accepted universally. Using computer as a tool to make colors gives a wide new world to chose colors. During that process, we can choose color from a non-visual start point but from numbers and methods. Combining intuition and computer methods could provide a precise and acceptable way of choosing color representations.