Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
By the way, black & white is also a great starting point for better charts.
Black & White Charts
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Jorge,
Did I miss something? I only see a one-line post providing no information. It’s not like any of your other posts that I’ve read.
To color or not to color… another fundamental question when designing graph.
I do agree that black & white is an interesting option has it allow for minimum fuzz and should prevent the adoption of inappropriate default themes and color option.
Opting to use grey for all non essential data series allows the use of black to single out one data series in particular. Using thickness can also enhance precognitive identification and facilitate visual comparison.
As to why and how we should use color (taking into consideration that a small portion of the population is colorblind) in would recommend have a look at Cindy Brewers “Color Brewer”. She describes the use of color to carry information on different scales (Binary / Ordinal / Sequential / Diverging).
On top of this, we could also consider the notion of creating a balanced color palette.
With all this in mind, one has to devote enough time to try different schemes and identify the most appropriate and efficient graphs color options.
@Rene: Let’s say this is not a post, just a quick reminder of what the day is today. Normal program will resume in a few moments…
@Bernard: Great comment, thanks. Color should be used functionally and perhaps symbolically, not to prettify. That’s not always possible, but it should be our goal.
Useless. How to create a chart with all black-and-white series in Excel 2007?
@Ivan: Doesn’t have to be black and white. You can use several shades of gray, and that’s a good start.