Today I spent most of my time preparing a Weekly Chart for the end of December in which we’ll reveal, once again, which charts all of you created. And the highlight of the day was certainly talking to the team of Our World in Data about how they work and about how Datawrapper works.
In-between, I did discover this Twitter thread here (thanks to somebody who I follow and who retweeted or liked it). It explains how new monitors will be able to display more colors and that we’ll probably use the LCH color space more than the RGB color space in the future. Super interesting! From there, I went to the article “LCH colors in CSS: what, why, and how?” by Lea Verou from 2020, in which she explains why LCH is neat and how to use it in CSS.
Lea also wrote a LCH Colour Picker, which I see myself using quite a lot in the coming weeks and months.
Lea also contributed to the W3C CSS Color Module Level 5 draft that got updated a few days ago and makes for a fascinating read.
In the book, I won’t focus on how to use CSS to get all your colors right. But LCH is definitely a color space we all should be using because it’s perceptional uniform (a phrase I didn’t understand until I started reading papers on color). Gregor also implemented it in our Datawrapper color picker.
Quote of the day (and motivation to myself): “There’s an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing. When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.” – David McCullough, via Austin Kleon