Sophie Fu

Specifically noting the perception of color, I am wondering whether or not certain ranges of colors would not be perceived as different from one another. Not to the extent of color blindness, in which green and red are highly indistinguishable, but rather in the case of the equiluminant colors chart where the spread is radial. The closer to the center of the circle the colors get, the more vague the color differences end up being. In that sense, we can see the same effect happen in our Retinal Variables charts, for the hue and value gradiations the initial start was nearly unperceivable.

In that sense, it seems to be necessary to avoid the usage of green, as the general blend of color seems to accentuate this problem even more so than other colors. Color palettes that have both a progression in lightness as well as a shift in hue seem to be the best solution as the two ends of the color spectrum, as a result, vary so drastically from one another that the middle increments have a more distinguishable step up from the previous.

On the otherhand, it is interesting that for Divergent Data, because the focus is more on the two ends rather than all values, the full palette tends to want more of the eye catching variances to avoid the center range. Categorical Data focuses on distinct hues for each value, with the reading stating that the maximum number is around 12, or possibly even fewer. To go over this estimation would mean that certain colors may start to resemble another specific color on the spectrum, which may cause confusion in perceiving the chart if it is a large scatter of colors.