ENGL 4182/5182: Information Design & Digital Publishing » November 13th: More on Color

November 13th: More on Color

Plan for the Day

We’ve got a few things to do today, so below is a list:

  • Information Design Critique Due next week (11/20)
    • Information Design Critique Workshop–get ideas from classmates!!!
  • 5182 Project Presentations next week (11/20)
  • Perception, Culture, Rhetoric and Color
  • Ch. 6 Design for Information
  • Color Schemes
  • Document #3 Issues

Perception, Culture, Rhetoric

Color perception is an interesting subject that deals with physiological responses. While I don’t expect you to be well versed in the anatomy of the eye, there are several terms you should know:

  • visible spectrum: “a small range of wavelengths between 700 and 400 nanometers (nm)” in which humans can perceive light. There is other light, but we can’t see it without special devices (See discussion on infrared wavelengths).
    • hue: wavelengths of light that cause us to perceive different colors.
    • saturation: perception of the purity of color. More saturation, more pure and vibrant colors (hue).
      • unsaturation: a mixture of colors. More unsaturated, more muted color.
    • brightness: perception of the intensity of light that is transmitted or reflected from a surface.
  • tristimulus: human perception of colors based on the mixture of perception of the three types of cones in the eye: red, green, and blue.
  • ganglion cells: the nerves that help distinguish between colors.
  • additive primary colors: red, green, and blue.
    • cyan…it’s not the pepper; pronounced cy–an.
  • complementary colors: two colors directly opposite from each other on the 360-degree color wheel.
  • analogous colors: colors close together on the same wheel.
  • Color Temperature: obviously, this is related to our feelings associated with various colors.
    • warm colors: colors naturally brighter at the same level of saturation (i.e. red and yellow).
    • cool colors: colors not as bright as warm colors at the same saturation (i.e. green and blue).
  • color vision deficiency: limitation in perceiving color differences.

Design for Information Ch. 6 “Textual Structures”

Last chapter! There are a couple things I want to focus our attention on, but below are some general “hits” of the chapter.

  • p. 185: The description of the changes to Darwin’s book mentions the visualization allows us to understand something fundamental about science: “‘We often think of scientific ideas…as fixed notions that are accepted as finished.'”
  • p. 187 and pp. 204-205: Types of Data
    • Nominal (Categorical) Data: No implicit quantitative relationship or inherent ordering, but we can group data into categories
    • Ordinal Data: Arrange in a given order or rank–which comes first, which is bigger, etc.
    • Quantitative Data: Measured and manipulated using statistical methods.
  • p. 187: Citing Moretti: “Quantitative research provides a type of data which is ideally independent of interpretations…and that is of course also its limit; it provides data, not interpretation.”
    • Unfortunately, no data stand on their own; all data is a construction, filtered by gathering the data in a set.
  • Time permitting, a look a the “Technical Notes” for the statistics in this CDC Report.
  • p. 189: The goal of most natural-language data analysis is to look for patterns, structures, or relationships within a collection of documents (corpus).
    • Three Types of Visualization of textual data
      1) Connections among entities within and across documents (think patterns across multiple data sets–what types of words do scientists, architects, and politicians use?)
      2) Language patterns and word frequencies (think how often scientists say “probable”; how often do they say “certain”)
      3) Analyze relationships between words in their usage (consider how words appear and what appears before or after them)
  • p. 191: The purpose of textual mining is to abstract elements “from the narrative flow, and construct a new, artificial object” that allows us to analyze different aspects of a text.
    • For instance, we could analyze a dataset of twelfth graders’ essay for sentence length, compound sentences, and compound-complex sentences. Then, after statistical manipulation (quantitative), we could say the average twelfth-grade writer uses more of these sentences, less of these, and almost none of these.
  • p. 190: Why would Stanford’s letter and travel mapping program be important to studying a particular historical figure?
  • p. 192: Ware (again) on memory and Dual Coding Theory:
    • Imagens, mental representations of visual information, are processed first (think word shape, size, weight, etc.)
    • Logogens, mental representations of language information, are the nonvisual associations stored in long-term memory (think concepts leading to abstract thought; your memory has already stored information that helps you process the visual world)
    • Consider the word “cat,” which is very easy to define, understand, and associate with known images.
    • Now, consider the word, ennui, a concept that means the boredom felt by Westerners in late modernity. The French word is translated, “boredom, tedium, worry.”
  • p. 193: “There is an inherent temporal nature to language that transforms language into a sequence of mentally recreated dynamic utterances.”
  • p. 194: The wonderful world of word clouds!

Color and Culture

Obviously, in the context of the United States, red, white, and blue are patriotic colors, plastered all over campaign documents.

Let’s consider color and time period…Think about the colors in homes (appliances, couches, curtains, etc.) from media or your life. What prevailing colors seem to identify the following decades:

Color Scheme Groupwork

Go back to last week’s section on color schemes and answer a few questions and put up a webpage.

Then, move on to your Information Design Critique Workshop. Some of you expressed that you weren’t sure if you could write 4 double-spaced pages on a document. I assure you that you can, assuming the document is big enough. For instance, you probably can’t write 4 pages on a business card, but you could write plenty on a document like this one about a family game.

Matching Colors

I know this is a peculiarity of mine, but color matching is really ingrained racism of a culture. Let me explain…

Choropleth Maps

I absolutely doubt we’ll get around to this, but I’m including it here just in case. If anything, I want us to at least add the “Geographic Heat Map” App to Excel. If there’s a problem, I’ll try to track down someone who can help.

My first choropleth map! Click here for the data in Excel, and click here if you get lost in the tutorial.

My second choropleth map! Click here for the data in Excel. I created that data set from here.

Your classmate Zach informed me about a more powerful program called SimplyAnalytics, but I haven’t played around with it because it requires you to create an account. It looks like a good resource, though.

Document #3 (Tutorial or Brochure) Issues

I’ll turn back your Tutorials or Brochures tonight, but, as usual, below are a few general issues to consider:

  • Red circles in Photoshop
  • Uniform, clear screen shots (paste them in Photoshop)
  • “Basal” text–not the herb
  • MS Word Document look…it’s ok to use Word, but try not to have your document look like an assignment–even though it is
  • Stay parallel
  • Use captions for extra-textual elements (Figure X.X)
  • [Color] C=___ M=___ Y=___ K=___
  • Don’t just state what a color means based off some out-of-context web page or your own idiosyncratic “logic”; you have to let me know why a color means what it does. There are several interpretations possible.
    • Why is blue calming?
    • Why is yellow for sickness?
    • Exceptions: Green for environmental stuff and Red for danger or love…those are pretty common.

Those of you who haven’t turned in these portfolio assignments will definitely want to get them to me ASAP.

Next Week

I don’t have any new reading for you for next week, so use your time to finish any reading you might have missed. We’ll be moving onto extra-textual elements and wrapping up any topics we needed to go back to.

We’ll have the 5182 group do their presentations on Nov. 27th. Then, we’ll just prepare for your presentations and portfolios due 12/04.