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Comment by contrarian1234 | Hacker News Reader

These colors really capture what I dislike about modern color design. I rather have gaudy bright colors than all these pastels. Almost every "Not Ideal" look so much nicer and with character. She managed to make everything look like a brochure at a children's hospital

I think a simple piece of advice (stolen from Tuft) is to not use colors unless you really need to. If you can find a way to present the same information in black and white - it's generally going to be better. The next step up.. If you need to highlight somethings, maybe just use one color (ex: red). Don't bring out the whole pastel bile rainbow immediately. And try to stick to consistent colors to convey meaning

For color gradients I find these incredibly useful (though the license/attribution-requirement is kinda annoying)

https://colorcet.com/

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Thank you from the color blind camp! The whole article neglects accessibility for people with vision problems.

The same author has written three other articles specifically on colorblindness and data visualization:

https://blog.datawrapper.de/colorblindness-part1/ https://blog.datawrapper.de/colorblindness-part2/ https://blog.datawrapper.de/colorblindness-part3/

They miss out on the face that accessibility should be a default consideration as a designer. It's not a specific realm that needs designed separately. Assume that someone will always be colourblind.

Also, a key problem that some of those “ideal” colour choices run into is how many people out there have shockingly bad screens, or half decent screens setup oddly for their lighting environment. What looks more pleasant on my screen and yours, using choices that are not “all over the colour wheel” might result in things not looking different enough on other people's screens. Sometimes it is fine when the colours are next to each other, but not when they are shown alone or on the same display but far apart. The “same display but far apart” can be an issue itself with really bad displays, with, for example, two colours that look distinct in one corner looking almost identical in another or in the middle.

A milder symptom of the issue is that even for people with good enough screens setup reasonably well, there will be differences between them that compound the fact that we all perceive what is good in colour selections slightly differently to become an obvious example of the adage “you can't please everyone all the time”.

> the license/attribution-requirement is kinda annoying

There might be circumstances where it is a mild inconvenience, but I don't see the attribution clause of CC-BY to be at all arduous. Though I would suggest they change the text to explicitly mention v4 (the link does, but the text doesn't) – earlier versions of the BY licences had an accidental trap that could be used by unpleasantly by legal trolls in some jurisdictions (ref: https://creativecommons.org/2022/02/08/copyleft-trolls/)

All personal opinion .. But I honest hate attribution licenses. In many cases it's inconvenient and not obvious how and where to put it

Say I made a poster at a conference and a small graph uses his colors. Where am I to put this attribution? Can you imagine if every color you used required an attribution ? Thankgod Microsoft doesn't require it in every PowerPoint presentation

I find the whole thing sorta legalistic and inhuman. You attribute when it's relevant. If you're extending something then I think it's the decent thing to attribute who's work you're basing it on, when possible relevant and convenient. Having stuff like pasting in "OpenStreetMap" in the corner of every single map online just makes the world uglier and doesn't help anyone. (not to mention it doesn't even give exposure to the people who mapped the area you're showing)

Id gladly pay $10 to the guy so I never have to use an attribution

EDIT: Just to illustrate the horror. There is an R package with these colors: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/cetcolor/cetcolor.pd...

First time I've seen a library with "License CC BY-SA 4.0". A library that requires attribution in whatever it creates.. 0_0

The attribution in that package hardly seems at all excessive, particularly given is it essentially a wrapper around the original work. Unless I'm missing something obvious (which is not an uncommon occurrence!). What about it makes you feel strongly enough to use the word “horror”?

My reading is that the attribution is not needed for the library, but for the output. It isn't “creating” that output as such, just regurgitating the original colour map data and the attribution needed if for that data.

But if the attribution requirement is for the library as well as the information it presents:

> Id gladly pay $10 to the guy so I never have to use an attribution

Maybe that is an option. Or if not, as with all licences we can't/won't agree to, there are other things you could use instead or even produce your own from first principles.

At the end of the day, it's his project to license :)

Licenses that require the output to have attribution? I've honestly never seen it before. Next we'll have fonts that require attributions.. The closest thing I've seen is some programs stipulating the output must not be used for profit. Maybe horrifying is hyperbolic, but it's honestly quite sneaky ... and I'd never notice something like that. CC BY-SA 4.0 isn't really a code license.. and if I saw that I'd not even be sure what that means. My initial impression was it'd mean you can copy, modify and redistribute the source code - as long as you attribute it?

"or even produce your own from first principles"

Not a bad idea though probably not so straightforward. Doing a quick websearch, I'm surprised nobody seems to have reproduced it

EDIT: Searching a bit more.. it seems people just use these colors without attribution :/

The not ideal colours are almost universally "too loud" and "in your face" for me.

A good compromise could be running them through CMYK softproofing. As a bonus, you'll get colors that are more printable.

> I think a simple piece of advice (stolen from Tuft) is to not use colors unless you really need to.

Funny, read your comment as my copy of Tufte's VDoQI is open to page 154:

"Color often generates graphical puzzles. Despite our experiences with the spectrum in science textbooks and rainbows, the mind's eye doe not readily give a visual ordering to colors, except possibly for red to reflect higher levels than other levels [...] Attempts to give colors an order result in those verbal decoders and the mumbling of little mental phrases [...] Because they do have a natural visual hierarchy, varying shades of gray show varying quantities better than color."

I guess tastes are different, but I can't really follow how you like the not- ideal super bright colors and at the same time advocate using only shades of grey.

Shades of grey colorized would result in the same pastel colors you seem to dislike, because grey, by definition, isn't "full brightness".

> I rather have gaudy bright colors than all these pastels. Almost every "Not Ideal" look so much nicer and with character. She managed to make everything look like a brochure at a children's hospital

That's a great description that goes with my (conspiracy?) theory: Popular media intended for general consumption (which are the exampes the author shows) uses these colours not because they're better for comprehension, but because a big segment of the general public is afraid of data and charts, and these colours let the data fade away into the background for those folks.

The point is to subtly say "it's okay if you don't get this data, this isn't really important" - a compromise between omitting the data altogether and giving it full importance and clarity.

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