Quantitative Color Scales
Last updated
Last updated
A quantitative color scale is designed to represent quantitative information. It has 2 main properties: uniformity and discriminability.
This means that the color scale must be perceptually uniform i.e. value difference = perceived difference
To create a uniform color scale, we must start with a single hue/color and then uniformly vary the luminance/lightness, keeping the saturation constant.
This refers to being able to represent as many distinct values as possible by having as many distinct colors as possible.
The previous subsection depicted a single hue color scale. We can also use multi-hue color scales, starting with a dark color and ending with a light color, with several other hues in the middle, in uniformly increasing order of lightness.
Some common reasons to use multi-hue color scales:
aesthetics
a larger set of colors increases discriminability
allows us to communicate two types of information at once: we can depict quantity and also perform segmentation into regions that can be easily labeled (ex. the red region, the blue region, the yellow region etc.)
