Tufte Ch. 5 Commentary
In this week’s reading, Tufte talked about color and multidimensionality. This relates directly to our Dondis reading. They both emphasized how color is a practical element in visual design to portray more dimensions to objects, paintings, or data. Tufte supports this by providing an example of a scatter plot with clusters of different colors. Without the colors on that flat plane, we couldn’t have noticed the groups the emerged in the dataset. Another aspect of color is the variations it provides through the different hues and tones. However, according to Tufte, this is not an effective tool used alone. He suggested using other cues in addition to colors such as size or shape to make the variations more visually powerful and precise.