The Subtleties of Color

It is known that humans are unable to process all colors of the world. With our limited perceptions of color, the tools we use to transmit color data become crucial in our daily life. Color profiles like RGB, HSB and CIE L*C*h served different purposes depending on the ultimate medium. The fact that humans are less able to perceive saturated blue than red and green has to be taken into when designing data visualizations.

The method of increasing lightness while shifting hue is a wonderful solution for visualizing the scale of data. However it is only appropriate for sequential datasets.  It is also interesting to see the colors used in divergent datas and the importance of catering towards color blind individuals.  Categorical data on the other hand is tricky to manage as a very controlled color palette is needed.