Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg from Hint.fm show us the colors of a year in a surprising way. The visualization is based on photographs from the Bostom Common taken from Flickr.com and rendered using a custom application.

Using an algorithm developed for the WIRED Anniversary visualization, our software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel.

Together with Heather Burke the final visualization was combined with some of the original images and presented in  Boston Magazine.

Chad Hagen creates and shares some deliciously designed information graphics. The charts are completely senseless and unusable but gorgeous in perspective of color choice, typography and overall presentation.
The worn-out look and the absurdity of the subjects brings the art of Bruce McCall (especially the Faux-Nostalgia series) to mind. Put away the analytical seriousness for a second and enjoy the visual aesthetics.

Full set on Flickr
Hat tip to @herrstucki

Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas have created an information graphic called “The Conversation Prism” sorting and categorizing an extensive range of webapplication. The Applications represented by their logos are arranged in a circular, flower-like structure. Each leaf represents another media or focus group and holds the major players of this field. The leaves are color coded and thus grouped in larger divisions.

The visualization would make a posh interactive applet. We could imagine details on demand for each service, dynamic loading of example content from these services (as most of them have public APIs nowadays), filtering based on business model, sorting based on traffic or active users etc. The static visualization gives a good overview and does a great job in the categorization – with a well thought trough interction model the idea behind the visualization could be taken to the next level.

Over the past few days some thoughts about the importance of color palettes in data visualization has been published. Color is a vibrant discussed topic and there are contrary opinions on the best practices of the implementation of a color palette. Without getting into to much about our own findings (some of which can be found here) we let the posts speak for themeselves.

From Michael E. Driscoll over at Data Evolution comes the original article “Color: The Cinderella of dataviz” about the lack of focus on color in visualizations. It’s an elusive read for anybody interested unsure about the benefit of the solid usage of colors in visualization. The article is referencing some of the most fundamental theories from Tufte to Few.

From Fisheye Perspective comes a follow-up post discussing some of the original thoughts. The article gets complemented with some more resources about the topic.

After all I stoumbled over a great set of slides from Ross Ihaka (Department of Statistics, University of Auckland). The slides cover a lot of topics around information visualization and the slides 12, 13, 14 are focused on color in visualization.

Have you come across some more recent articles about the topic? You’re welcome to share your resources in the comments.

Adobe just rolled out a new feature over at Kuler. Pulse is a tool to visualize the colors used on Kuler related to country, season and tag. The color set can be scale in regard on granularity as well as the lighness of the colors.

You can further explore different shades of a color and their percentage in the color related to the other shades.

Beside the single visualization of a color set, the user has the possibility to compare to different color sets. Let’s say you want to compare what colors european people in spring ’08 used to the colors american color-enthusiasts used in autumn ’08 for the tag “hot”. The comparison could lead to an understanding of diverting perceptions depending on geographical and seasonal differences.