Information Design
4 issues tagged with this topic.
Color for Data Visualization: Clarity Over Aesthetics
Data visualization has its own color grammar — one where beauty takes a back seat to communicative precision. This issue covers categorical, sequential, and diverging scales, accessibility for color blindness, and when to break the rules.
Color Hierarchy in Information Design: How to Signal What Matters Most
In information design, color hierarchy does exactly what type hierarchy does in typography — it tells the reader what order to read in and what level of importance each element carries. Done well, it is invisible infrastructure. Done poorly, it makes complex information feel chaotic regardless of how well organized the underlying data is.
Color in Data Visualization: Encoding Information Without Confusion
Data visualization uses color to encode information, not just to establish aesthetic register. This creates constraints and best practices that are completely different from brand or product design — and many designers trained in visual design make the same mistakes when they first work with data.
Color in Data Visualization: The Rules That Make Charts Readable and Honest
Choosing colors for data visualization is not a design problem — it's a perception problem. The rules that make charts readable come from vision science, not aesthetics. How sequential, diverging, and qualitative schemes work, and why the wrong palette can make accurate data actively misleading.