Schools in developing countries may not have color printer, and not every student has access to computer and the Internet. The brown and the orange tiles pointed by an white arrow are actually of the same color.Īnd you asked 'how many people actually read print articles anymore?' I would think that there are a lot. For instance, here is an example borrowed elsewhere. Particularly, colors interact just by pairing with some different colors, the same color can look different. I do agree that colors catch attention, but just because it gets attention does not mean people can distinguish them well and can isolate the information well.

If there is anything that does the same job, remove the colors because now the colors are 'non-informative ink,' as described by Tufte. The baseline for me is, the added colors should have their dimension (aka variable) to represent. In other words, if I have two curves to show, I'd opt for paneling them onto to their own coordinate then put the graphs side by side, or plotting them together using line with different styles or grey scales over using colored lines. I may not go thus far to suggest color is worse than area and volume, but I do agree that positioning along non-aligned scales is much better than color. Bill Cleveland, whom I consider the guru of visualization in science, advises that color should actually be avoided.

Though for that, I'd just like to share another point of view. You mention there is research backing up the use of color, which I do believe there must be. Each combination can conjure a certain type of feeling, color schemes that seem absurd may work in other settings. It's meant to be for map making, but the idea works for visualization all across the broad.įor graphs that are used in more eye-catching media such as reports, posters or infographics, you may consider taking some advice from fashion and interior designers (See the graph below proposed by Japanese Shigenobu Kobayashi). It allows users to specify colorblind-safe and photocopy-able color schemes.

It's also embedded in ggplot2 which is a common choice of graphing package in R. I use Cynthia Brewer's website Colorbrewer to pick color schemes.

Good and bad scientific figures