Tufte’s chapter on Color and Information was an interesting read. I liked that Tufte talked about diminishing and even negative returns when it comes to usage of color – he specified 20-30 colors, but I think it could be even less than this. Particularly in websites today, we see a range of 2-5 main colors, perhaps with varying shades that can increase the “number” of colors. I didn’t like Tufte’s example on the uses of color in information design to label, measure, represent, and decorate. Tufte seemed to just describe any scene in nature, which isn’t really information design – in his example, all the colors simply represented reality. I thought Imhof’s rules were interesting, but I didn’t agree with all of them. Rule 2 in particular I didn’t understand what Imhof defined as “light, bright colors mixed with white” – I didn’t think the example used was a good one.

I also disliked both the US map example and Burnham’s map. The US map tries to combine too many bright, bold colors, when more complementary colors or varying shades of the same color (depending on how many types are being mapped) would have been more coherent. However, I disagree that Burnham’s example is coherent just because muted colors were used with gray. The green and red definitely stand out, but do not create a pleasing effect together and are rather jarring against the background.

Steven Few’s article on the chartjunk debate was a good read and mainly focused on one study in accordance with Tufte’s definition of chartjunk. Bateman et al’s “Useful Junk?” tests the influence of chartjunk vs. minimalistic graphs on comprehension and recall. Though the study seems to demonstrate that embellished graphs are better than minimalist graphs, Few disagrees, contending with the argument that the embellished graphs were more often than not just graphics. I agree with this, but not with the examples Few goes on to use. I particularly didn’t like his example of an embellished graph – it definitely used a lot of features inappropriately, and while I would describe the graph as chartjunk, I think with proper usage of the visual elements (gradients, images, etc.) it could have been a nicely embellished graph that was more interesting. I also don’t agree with the author that the minimalist graphs from the study were poorly designed. Looking at just the first example, I think the lack of color was purposeful, I don’t understand why the axes were flipped in Few’s version, and the box doesn’t harm the graph at all.