
"I Want Hue" – Colors for Data Scientists - jacomyal
http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/iwanthue/
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monkeyfacebag
I really like the interaction and flexibility, but I failed to generate a set
of colors as nice as those provided by Color Brewer
(<http://colorbrewer2.org/>). Sure, Color Brewer doesn't dynamically generate
color schemes, but the set of colors it provides looks damn good in just about
any context. I might use this new app in cases where I need more than 12
colors (Color Brewer's limit), but I don't think dynamic color scheme
generation adds much. The JSON and CSS exports do seem very useful, however,
and a big improvement over Color Brewer's interface.

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paulgb
Here are Color Brewer palettes in CSS and JSON:
<https://github.com/mbostock/d3/tree/master/lib/colorbrewer>

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michaelhoffman
This is really nice! And attractive.

One of the reasons I'll probably stick with ColorBrewer palettes for now is
that I can easily find color schemes that are safe for people with
colorblindness or for display in particular environments.

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DigitalJack
I appreciate this. For a deficiency that affects so many men, I'm always
dismayed by the lack if awareness.

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snprbob86
Cool! I also really like <http://colorschemedesigner.com/>

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carlob
It's interesting they've started this médialab in Science Po, which is (as the
name implies) a social sciences _university_ [0] in Paris [1].

Looking at the team [2] the name of Bruno Latour as a director seems a bit out
of place. After his controversial views on the social construction of science
[3] I find it astonishing that he is put at the head of the department that is
in charge of bridging the world of the social scientists with that of the
quantitative methods and hard sciences.

[1] Grande école actually.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sciences_Po>

[2] <http://www.medialab.sciences-po.fr/en/team/>

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour#Laboratory_Life>

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_delirium
I don't see Latour as a particularly bad choice for bridging those worlds. One
of his main points is paying close _empirical_ attention to both how
scientists actually work, and how non-human things work. Unlike a lot of
humanities theorists of science, he actually went into laboratories and wrote
down what seem like pretty honest accounts of what he found there. He's fairly
controversial among pure social constructionists partly as a result. For
example, he had a dispute with David Bloor some years ago [1] over Latour's
insistence on including nonhuman objects in his explanation of how science
works (rather than treating science as a purely social process). More
recently, he's been attacking the tendency, born of the legacy of critical
theory, to treat intellectual activity as a series of de-maskings of something
the scholar will always find to be "naive" [2].

I mean, the last thing we should want, as scientists, is to have blind faith
in a quasi-religious, idealized view of how science works, rather than
empirically investigating how it actually works. Plus he seems pretty
interested lately in tying in some philosophical ideas with quantitative
network-analysis methods: [http://www.bruno-
latour.fr/sites/default/files/123-WHOLE-PAR...](http://www.bruno-
latour.fr/sites/default/files/123-WHOLE-PART-FINAL.pdf)

[1] Bloor's attack on Latour,
[http://reclus.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/bloor-anti-
latour....](http://reclus.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/bloor-anti-latour.pdf),
and a reply, [http://www.melissa.ens-cachan.fr/IMG/pdf/latour_-
_reponse_a_...](http://www.melissa.ens-cachan.fr/IMG/pdf/latour_-
_reponse_a_bloor.pdf)

[2] <http://www.pathguy.com/Latour.pdf>

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mtraven
This probably isn't the place to have a debate on Latour, but let me just say
that it is possible to read him unsympathetically (as Sokal does) or
sympathetically, to try to understand the viewpoint he is trying to get
across. I've found it worthwhile to do the latter, but YMMV.

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_delirium
I more or less agree. I used to have a more negative view, but I realized that
what you get from Sokal et al is a fairly inaccurate and biased reading.

Actually, while I thought the Sokal hoax itself was brilliant, I'm in
retrospect quite disappointed by his follow-up book. It reads like a bit of a
lazy hatchet-job by someone trying to put together an "attack" piece without
having read the stuff he's attacking, and certainly not trying to read it
sympathetically.

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hotpockets
I've used something similar in matlab, which I though worked a little better.
It started out with red green blue, colors frequently considered maximally
distinct, at least on color monitors for the non-colorblind. Then it just
found maximally distant points in the color cube. I found it worked nicely and
you could also seed it with your own starting color(s).

Edit: found out it is based on Lab color space.

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svachalek
I'm no color expert but I'm pretty sure color distance in RGB space is a
pretty poor metric compared to other color models (at least some of them).
Looking at an RGB color cube I see big splashes of near-identical colors while
the entire spectrum of oranges is hard to even find.

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hotpockets
Looking closer, it uses the Lab colorspace. Here is what I was using:
<http://www.mathworks.us/matlabcentral/fileexchange/29702>

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desbest
I prefer <http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html> and
<http://www.workwithcolor.com/hsl-color-schemer-01.htm>

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jostmey
As someone who has put together figures for a scientific paper, I can safely
say that the last thing I want are a wide-range of colors to use. Many people
are color-blind, and many people print on black & white printers. So when I
design the figures, I stick with pure colors. Pure red (255,0,0) or pure green
(0,255,0) or pure blue (0,0,255). I suppose it would be smarter to design a
set of color codes where even if someone were missing one of the three color
receptors in their eye, they would still be able to discern each individual
color as distinct. Perhaps (128,128,0), (128,0,128), (0,128,128).

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cscheid
This will sound snarky, but there's just too much that's wrong with this
comment to let it stand. For people reading this: please don't do any the
above.

Go here for good color scales and spare yourself the risk of getting it all
wrong: <http://colorbrewer2.org>

If you're going to not use colorbrewer, please, either know what you're doing
(and if you're reading this comment, you don't) you either stick with black
and white, or you at least use orange and blue (orange and blue is a
combination that's safe with most common types of color-blindness, and also
tends to separate well in black-and-white conversions).

Just as importantly: don't try to guess what colors look like for colorblind
people, either (and don't do it in RGB space like the original post suggested
either! RGB is a device-centric coordinate system; please use something like
Lab or Luv). The rightest, simplest way to simulate different types of color
blindness is to use define 2D affine subspaces of Lab space, like here:
[http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/%7Eoliveira/pubs_files/CVD_Mass_Spri...](http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/%7Eoliveira/pubs_files/CVD_Mass_Spring/CVD_Mass_Spring.html)
(figure 2, in page 3)

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paulgb
Are there any particular resources you'd recommend on getting to know this
stuff?

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ChrisNorstrom
Aw, so sorry to tell you but it doesn't work in the latest version of IE. I'm
not even sure if you should bother trying to get it to work but at minimum
just put up a message to IE users telling them to use another browser.

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mxfh
Great tool, it heavily uses chroma.js

<http://vis4.net/blog/posts/avoid-equidistant-hsv-colors/>

<https://github.com/gka/chroma.js>

The HCL color space is also available in this d3 module:
<https://github.com/d3/d3-plugins/tree/master/cie>

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ChuckMcM
This is an interesting tool, it fails at 16 colors. Which is surprising. (it
may be the gamut of my display of course but I would think 16 would be within
its abilities). That is probably the most number of distinct colors I've
needed in a graph. Works nicely for numbers 10 and below.

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mturmon
Hmm...the linked page worked for me on several tries for 16, 20, and 22
colors, even restricting the luminance somewhat.

I used the protovis categorical colors
(<http://mbostock.github.com/protovis/docs/color.html>, see at the bottom of
the page) when I needed a 20-color map recently.

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ChuckMcM
Those are nice, I've bookmarked the protovis ones. Re-running my experiment, I
seem to get two nearly identical magentas or two nearly identical greens every
time I re-roll. It is entirely possible its my monitor though.

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RuggeroAltair
Great work! Is there already an API to use? It would be great to use it
directly and credit this website for the algorithms used. The dynamical
palette would become very useful in that case.

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mixedbit
Is it hard to automatically generate a large (say 100+) palette of colors of
increasing intensity that go well together? Do you have pointers to any
algorithms for this?

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hadem
The color section (after creating a palette) looks very similar to
<http://www.colourlovers.com/colors>

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lignuist
Recently I was looking for something like this for a visualization. I had to
find 16 nice looking distinct colors, which turned out to be pretty hard.
Thanks!

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melloclello
Ohhh man I feel like I have been waiting years for this to exist

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mnicole
Love this, even just for website palettes. Nice work.

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anigbrowl
Lovely UX, more like this please.

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Raydric
I'm glad it's not a Mordekaiser circle jerk.

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huhsamovar
Any solutions for colour blind scientists?

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aw3c2
Check out <http://colorbrewer2.org/>

