Today my boss and I decided that this updates blog will live…on Notion! It’s a software for a company wiki and a todo tool, and we at Datawrapper already use it internally a lot. I set the blog space properly up today, wrote a FAQ (let me know if I should extend it) and added some moons and tags.
Then I tried to understand the difference between the L of the LUV/LAB color space and the Y of the XYZ color space. I think I need some help with that.
And then I stumbled once again upon a site called handprint.com.
Bruce MacEvoy is responsible for it, a hyphen-hater and “middle aged male” who, after founding companies and working for Yahoo! until 2000, now spends his days painting in California. He put together these amazing, in-depth articles on color theory.
https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/tech13.html
And I just started reading and enjoying it, when I thought: “This…is probably not what’s best for the book right now.”
No matter if I’m designing data visualizations or write blog posts, first asking questions and then looking for answers (in form of data or papers) has been the best way of getting things done. Reading papers and looking at data without a question in mind is like swimming aimlessly in an infinite pool of interesting information: Enjoyable, but fruitless. Having a clear question gives me a clear directive: “You’re done swimming when the question is answered.”
The goal can also be “to understand what others have been writing about the topic” or “to check if I have any unknown unknowns about a topic”. But when I started reading the handprint.com articles today, I didn’t even have that.
So I stopped – and decided that I need to find more questions. I want to find out what people have troubles with when choosing colors in data visualizations. That was my plan from the beginning – that’s why I set up the survey a few weeks ago. A the end of the survey, I asked people if I can get in touch with them to learn about their use of colors. A lot of the 250 nice people who replied gave me an email address. Today I read through all their answers (again) to the question “What would you like to get out of a book about COLOR in data visualization?”. I picked the most interesting one, set up Calendly (to let them easily schedule calls with me) – and I’m looking forward to getting in touch with some of them tomorrow or maybe next year.
Question of the day: Which questions are left to be answered in the book?
Quote of the day: “The true organ of vision is not the eye but the brain. By the time it enters awareness, color is really a complex judgment experienced as a sensation.” – Bruce MacEvoy