The perfect lead into my series on perceptual color palettes. Great post!
I thought it’d be interesting to run a simulation of what the map would actually look lie to viewers with the 3 types of color deficient vision. Below are my results for the first map. It is obvious from this simulation that while the map is OK for Tritanope viewers, the green and red areas are very confusing for Protanope and Deuteranope viewers.
The second map instead passed the simulation tests. Here I am showing the original at the top and the Deuteranope simulation at the bottom.
Last year a student, Kaori, from Japan spent some time with me at Leeds and we spoke a lot about how to use colour effectively in maps and in urban design generally. One of the issues we were looking at was whether the maps’ features would be discriminable to colour-blind observers (of which, of course, there are many). So I was interested to come across an interesting article today relating to this very issue.
Apparently the following image appeared in the Guardian newspaper:
It’s a colour-coded map of London. It shows areas of deprivation with red being the most deprived. It met with much criticism, however, and many people said they had difficulty in discriminating between the colours. Of course, colour-blind observers most commonly have difficulty discriminating in the red-green region of colour space. The company who made the map engaged in a debate with users on twitter and created…