Envisioning Information, Chapter 5 - Edward Tufte

I enjoyed this reading, because it provided plenty of effective and ineffective examples of the fundamental uses of color in information design: “to label (color as noun), to measure (color as quantity), to represent or imitate reality (color as representation), and to enliven or decorate (color as beauty).” This breakdown is one that I had never heard of before, but it makes a lot of sense and is quite straight forward to follow in the examples.

I liked the examples of the use color in the mathematical proofs — usually we see this represented with a lot of symbols and letters, so it can be harder to follow because you have to look a lot more closely to understand it, whereas here, you can know what piece of the diagram they are talking about with just a quick glance. It is specifically effective since the diagram just uses four colors — the primary colors and black — to represent the concept. I loved how this example was followed by the abstract pieces of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, who used very similar colors in their work, yet employing a very different fundamental use.

I agreed with Tufte claim that ROYGBIV is an ineffective scale in comparison to the clear visual sequence of tone. I think using a few colors, that have a corresponding scale of tone, is effective to create a wider range in certain cases, but a ROYGBIV scale is generally less intuitive to the viewer because each color has its own average tone, which generally does not make sense within that exact order.

Steven Few - The Chartjunk Debate

I thought the experiment that found that people recalled embellished charts better a few weeks later was interesting, but doesn’t really make the case for embellished charts, because in general people remember extremes better, whether they are good or bad. It was relevant that the readers understood the message of the embellished charts just as well as minimalist designs.

To me, the “2010 Sales” example really showed how much better minimalist chart design is compared to unnecessary chart junk — the minimalist design is far more readable and easy to comprehend. However, when the embellishments add to the meaning, then I think there is definitely a strong case for it. The next example, “Employment Costs for a Steelworker per Hour”, illustrates that clearly. The visual adds to the meaning, and the fact that the US has the highest costs is clearly emphasized. In this case, it really comes down to weather the goal is to be able to analytically compare information (such as having the lengths of the bars be to scale to visually compare one country to another), or to get a certain point across (like the fact that costs in the US are much higher).