Well Color Me Happy!

Color is so beautiful, ugly, chaotic and calm that it's easy to forget it's usefulness in our information-obsessed world. From street signs to the world atlas, color has been our friend in depicting everything from height, to temperature, weight, and even numbers. After reading a chapter titled "Color and Information" from Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte, it began to become clear how purposely and thoughtfully color should be used in pictorial information. For our class project we are to pick a data set with at least two variables in any kind of chart, graph, etc. that we choose. One will be in black and white, and two others (of the same graph) will be in different color pallets. I have decided to use my kitten, Zoe, as inspiration for my variables: time of day and what level of "pain" she inflicts upon myself and others.

Zoe:

I will upload the finished project for my next blog.

Tufte described Oliver Byrne's The Elements of Euclid (1847), of which I have seen many times but never realized how grateful I was when color was used in mathematics. I am.....well let's just say math and I have had a long, stressful relationship since the beginning--and yet, since the beginning, color and math have always come hand-in-hand for me. From the colorful cartoons that came with every situational math problem, to the simplest use of depicting a number from another. Color has been there for millions of children, teens, and adults throughout their days in school. Even my math professors from college would use different colors when writing our equations for us, be it chalk or markers.

Yet even through the general used of color, Tufte goes further to explain how carefully color not only should, but must be used in order to convey the information to the viewer. Something I hope I have accomplished with this project.