That “combining colors” chapter is tricky. I know I said that yesterday already, but yesterday I wasn’t yet down the rabbit hole of “what is beauty” and “when do we perceive beauty” and had not read papers with titles like “Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s Processing Experience?” yet. That all happened today. And I was so close to coming up with a grand theory of beauty in data vis before pulling myself together and saying “stop Lisa, just write down what you know, it’s not a grand theory, beauty can be x AND y. This book doesn’t need a three page essay on what is beauty.”
So I stopped and wrote down a few sentences and was happy with that. Phew.
I also replied to more people who had questions about the two amazing open positions at Datawrapper, reviewed a few applications, helped Rose design a header image for a blog post, and gave feedback to some chart design.
Screenshot from Matt Ström’s blog post “How to pick the least wrong colors”
Also: I’ll be on vacation for the next week 🎉, so you won’t get any updates from me in the meantime. I’ll leave you with an interesting read, though: “How to pick the least wrong colors” by Stripe designer Matt Ström, in which he tries to find nice-looking, accessible, quantitative color palettes.
See you in a week! 👋