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Designing the avocado of uncertainty visualization (stamen.com)
90 points by skadamat 7 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments



From a color palette decision, isn't green a bad choice? "I'm in the green, ok perfect I'll stay at home!" Why not use a perceptually uniform color gradation that has a vague connotation of danger, like the (aptly named) plasma, inferno, or magma color schemes from R's viridis color package? [1].

[1] https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/in...


From the images further in the article, it looks like CrisisReady uses a standard color palette.

The green color used in the banner image and the side-by-side image seem to be for emphasizing how the shape looks similar to an avocado, not for use in the actual reports.


In ancient times, they would have called that a shmoo of uncertainty, while avocado was the color your telephone and refrigerator happened to be.


That was the color of our countertops (formica) and oven door as well.


That was the color of our family station wagon :-(


> When we loaded the data onto our prototype we realized it looked like an avocado; the avocado of uncertainty!

Given the name of the company is "Stamen" they clearly have a masculine fruit bias.


Article says this...

> Forcing a user to relearn a system that may not be broken is poor design, so we wanted to maintain as much of these design characteristics as possible.

...which seems to conflict with this statement later in the article.

> As CrisisReady explained to us, people expect to see the cone of uncertainty in hurricane visualizations, though the avocado of uncertainty should remain the focus.


They don't do a great job of highlighting the final output, but they use both.


I get that unexpected and quirky titles drive clicks, but please, authors, give at lease some basic explanation in the beginning of your article. I shouldn't have to scroll almost halfway down the page to find out what "avocado of uncertainty" means.


It was pretty clear what it was going to be after the first sentence. Maybe run it by ChatGPT next time in lieu of reading or scrolling, it was able to figure it out when I asked just now.


Alright, well that was disappointing. No whimsical fruit to be found anywhere on that page. My imagination went wild for a moment.

I don't know what exactly I was expecting but I'm pretty broken up about it. :/




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