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| Subject: | RE: GISList: Re: Section 508 Question - Visual disabilities and m aps |
| Date: |
08/17/2001 06:44:50 AM |
| From: |
Anthony Quartararo |
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I digress. Indeed, there may be no intrinsic value (0 or 100) in "red", but
as you acknowledge, humans do respond psychologically to color schemes and
their implicit and/or explicit meanings. This is not an insignificant
issue, especially wherever the original thread of this topic intended to go,
because it is reality, not simply a cartographic-science theory. It is well
known and certainly plenty of literature to back it up, never mind every
marketing 101 class, that color makes people pay attention. Hatching
patterns, in-fills, etc. no matter how politically-correct, and no matter
how cartographically-correct, are boring. Can you imagine staring at a map
of the US with all 3000+ counties on it with varying infill or hatch
patterns? Ugh! You don't see any B/W cross-hatch maps winning any
blue-ribbons do you ? Why, because it's not sexy. Like it or not, maps are
created for a purpose, that purpose either gets communicated as effectively
as possible, right or wrong, or it doesn't. Is there such a thing as an
objective map? No way. So maps are going to be "biased" towards
communicating some information at the expense of others, and an effective
way to do that is with colors, be it quantitative or qualitative. Is pink a
better choice than maroon for indicating the "quality" of blood-supply by
State? Would the same map look better with b/w or even color infills of the
same density?
Anthony
-----Original Message-----
From: David.Irving@santos.com.au [mailto:David.Irving@santos.com.au\
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 10:13 PM
To: gislist@geocomm.com
Subject: RE: GISList: Re: Section 508 Question - Visual disabilities and
m aps
Ronald makes a point here which doesn't receive enough attention in these
days of comparatively cheap colour reproduction, which is that colour has
no intrinsic meaning. I recall reading in one of Bertin's books that colour
should _never_ be used to represent quantitative data (how big is red?).
That said, it's still handy to use colour to represent qualitative
differences, but then the colours need to be carefully chosen (partly
because of our psychological responses to them), particularly when the
needs of a colour-blind audience are to be considered. Qualitative
differences can be shown well with different infill patterns, but then we
need to be careful to use infills of the same density, so as not to imply
some quantitative difference that doesn't exist. It's lucky there are still
cartographers around, but unfortunate that our skills are so rarely used.
Regards,
David
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