Assignment #5: Experimenting with Color

The assignment for this week is to revisit and revise an earlier assignment. Your primary focus will be exploring a wide variety of color schemes and the relative effectiveness in communicating the data to your target audience. A secondary focus is to make a non-color related improvement to your first visualization.

For the color experimentation, try all or most of these palettes with your visualization:

• Shades of grey
• Black & white
• Cool vs. warm tones
• Bold/saturated vs. pastel colors
• Colorblind aware
• Light vs. dark background and/or color negation

Note: You may create multiple color schemes for each overall category above. Collect a variety of screenshots of these results and organize them for your writeup (either as a .pdf or plaintext with well named image files).

In the writeup discuss your rationale for each selecting the colors of each palette and why you assigned each color to the data. Consider using the Color Brewer 2.0 as a resource for selecting colors. If you find other resources for color selection, be sure to reference them in your writeup.

Analyze the effectiveness of each color scheme in relation to your overall purpose and audience for this visualization. How well does it allow the viewer to make accurate conclusions about the data? Might some color choices mislead your viewer? Compare the visualizations to each other.

In your writeup, also document what non color-related improvement(s) you have made to this visualization. This might be the source, quality, and size of the raw data; the algorithms for filtering or processing; the overall design of the visualization or the interactions with your data; or even the toolkit used to produce the visualization.