Archive: Color
October 9, 2009, 2:12 pm
What is Seeing?
by Lisa Agustin
TED Blog just posted a followup interview with neuroscientist/artist Beau Lotto, whose specialty is studying the relationship between your brain and what you see. According to Lotto, “The light that falls onto your eyes is meaningless.” In other words, light falling on a surface by itself does not convey meaning. Rather, what we see is a product of history, environment, and observation. Lotto’s 2009 TED Talk, “Optical Illusions Show How We See” demonstrates that optical illusions are not visual tricks so much as a means for making sense of the world based on our accumulated knowledge:
Illusion is more a state of the world than it is a state of mind. What’s being presented to you is an unusual situation. What you see is what would have been useful, given that situation in the past…The far more interesting question is not that “context matters” — not that we see illusions — but why we see them. When you see illusions, you’re entertaining two realities at the same time. You’re seeing one reality (two gray squares look different) but you also know another reality (that the gray squares are, in fact, physically the same).
Lotto’s comments provide good food for thought from an information design perspective, since information (visual or otherwise) has no inherent meaning until we view it through a lens that takes into account what the intended audience cares most about– their needs and goals–a by-product of their experience, expectations, and environment.
To find out more, see Beau Lotto’s web site: http://www.lottolab.org/index.asp.
February 24, 2009, 12:40 pm
Global Problems Demand Good Maps
by Henry Woodbury
The study of climate change is a global endeavor which means that data is often plotted to continental or world maps. As such, many of the challenges of good map making reappear as problems in presenting climate change data. Two researchers at the University of Idaho, Jean McKendry and Gary Machlis, point out that a key map from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers (PDF, p. 10), fails in both intelligibility and accuracy:
One of the most common ways in which climate maps can be misleading is to fail to take account of the map’s projection. “All map projections have distortions (distance, area, direction, and/or shape). For example, if temperature is displayed using coloured squares of equal size across the map, but the map projection does not minimize areal distortion, the squares appear to but do not represent equal areas on the Earth,” McKendry told environmentalresearchweb.
Other problems include overlapping data points, a multi-colored data scale, and unclear labels.
The map is reproduced below in all of its orange glory:
January 5, 2009, 12:18 pm
A Short History of the United Nations Logo
by Henry Woodbury
An obituary for architect and designer Oliver Lincoln Lundquist highlights his leadership in the creation of the United Nations logo. The story, as summarized by reporter Steven Heller, highlights the role of serendipity and a shift in point of view:
After the Navy, Mr. Lundquist attended the San Francisco conference at which the United Nations Charter was signed. His team was responsible for designing all the graphics for the conference and an official delegate’s badge, which became the prototype for the United Nations logo. The team did not set out to design the logo for the United Nations, but the badge became the prototype. It was initially designed by Donald McLaughlin, who worked for Mr. Lundquist as the director of graphics for the conference.
The distinctive blue in the design, Mr. Lundquist explained, was “the opposite of red, the war color.” He continued, “It was a gray blue, a little different than the modern United Nations flag.”
The symbol of the globe was also slightly different in the original design, he said: “We had originally based it on what’s called an azimuthal north polar projection of the world, so that all the countries of the world were spun around this concentric circle, and we had limited it in the Southern sector to a parallel that cut off Argentina because Argentina was not to be a member of the United Nations. We centered the symbol on the United States as the host country. Subsequently, in England our design was adapted as the official symbol of the United Nations, centered on Europe as more the epicenter, I guess, of the East-West world, and took into account the whole Earth, including Antarctica. By then, of course, Argentina had been made a member.”
October 23, 2008, 10:01 am
Don’t Eat the iPod Shuffle—Seven Years of iPod Design
by Kirsten Robinson
Wired has published a look back at iPod design, starting with this paper and foam core prototype from 2001:
Check out the article to find out how the scroll wheel evolved over time, when color was first introduced (on the body and the screen), and where the title of this post came from.
October 8, 2008, 12:44 pm
Political Word Clouds in Color
by Henry Woodbury
Using the Wordle platform, blogger Ann Althouse created a pair of word clouds from last night’s Barack Obama – John McCain U.S. presidential debate.
McCain’s cloud:
Obama’s cloud:
Althouse makes a profound point:
The most interesting words — like “Jell-O” and “corpse” — were only said once and stay off of their clouds. I’d like a program that makes a graphic of all the words that only appear once. They’re especially… important.
From a design perspective, what’s important is that word color, font, and placement don’t mean anything. Wordle allows you to choose your own colors and fonts for your word cloud and provides a gallery of placement options (horizontal, vertical, half and half, etc.). You can randomize all settings or reposition the words using current settings until you like the way they look.
Althouse is a law professor, but she has an art background and often blogs on art, photography, and the media. She clearly went for an aesthetic result in these two clouds. The McCain cloud looks like the “blue chill” palette, but I think the Obama cloud uses a custom palette, one designed to be different but complementary. Not that that means anything.
September 18, 2008, 3:34 pm
Test Your Color IQ
by Kirsten Robinson
See if you can arrange the color chips in order by hue. This reminds me of one of the exercises from the “Dynamics of Color” class I took at the DeCordova Museum.
