That was a day I’d definitely call successful. In the morning, I worked for a few hours on the structure of the book. I pasted the whole index onto a new page and started reorganizing, moving subsections and sub-sub-sections up and there.
And – for now – I got something I’m happy with; something I can work with. Two of the changes I made:
- I moved the “use intuitive colors” section from the big “use colors that improve the readability of your chart” chapter to an own “use fitting colors” chapter that will include color psychology and sentiment besides learned and natural color associations. It feels right to make it its own thing.
- And I moved the whole “when should you use sequential and when diverging color scales” content from “What to color by” to the end of the “readability” chapter. “What to color by” is (so far) one of the first chapters of the book, and I felt that this sequential/diverging content was too advanced to bring so early. It feels better to have it further down.
After looking at the structure and not thinking “🤔 that doesn’t feel right” anymore, I also started working on the mini-chapters. I finished seven of them today on how to emphasize categories (five of them I wrote from scratch, although I made heavy use of workshops that I gave on colors before and had done all the research on them already), including the figures (like the two above), and that felt really productive…until I saw that these seven sections were just 11 pages out of (so far) 180. (If 11 pages sounds like a lot: The figures and examples take up a lot of space. It’s not that much text.)
It’s hard to say now “oh, so it’ll take 180/11 = 16.4 days to finish the rough draft!” Some mini-chapters are already completely written; some are not even researched (e.g. color psychology). Even if: 16 days are four weeks, and I’ll be busy with other things, too. I once aimed for a rough draft at the end of May – but I also didn’t include in the calculation that I’d be sick for more than a week.
I’ll do my best. And will update the estimates once I have more information.