The Subtleties of Color A Series by Robert Simmon earthobservatory.nasa.gov The use of color to display data is a solved problem, right? Just pick a palette from a drop-down menu (probably either a grayscale ramp or a rainbow), set start and end points, press “apply,” and you’re done. Although we all know it’s not that simple, that’s often how colors are chosen in the real world. As a result, many visualizations fail to represent the underlying data as well as they could. colorvisualizationdata
The right overlap Overlap alone does not give structure. It can also give chaos. A garbage can is full of overlap. To have structure, you must have the right overlap. Christopher Alexander, A City Is Not a Tree The city's most vital organsThe multiplicity of living patterns structure