From Where I Sit: Changing Colors

By Larry Eiss

As spring turns to summer at Red Fox Run I am always struck by the changes in the colors around me. Early spring remains basically brown with hints of light green here and there. As spring progresses, green comes to prominence and the brown is overcome. Springtime brings flowers of many varieties and they too go through stages. As I gaze across the field in May everything is green with the occasional brown deer or black bird thrown in for variety. Later come the days of yellow. Dandelions. Snapdragons. Buttercups. Paintbrushes. White appears with the passing of June. Wild roses. Daisies. Flox. Subtle pinks and purples bloom, and the greens begin to darken. As summer continues the black-eyed Susans, goldenrod, and purple lustrife paint the landscape in gold and purple, the colors of royalty.

My wife and I love to watch birds, especially at the migration seasons when so many less common species grace our feeder, pond and trees. Over the years we have discovered that the birds change too. In winter we have birds of black, grey, brown, blue, and red. As spring comes, the olive-drab goldfinches, no doubt inspired by the return of other birds intense of hue and tint, shed their drab coats for nearly fluorescent yellow. Black birds with red epaulettes on their wings appear. So do the Orioles with their glorious orange and black fashions. Just this weekend I added a new sighting to our collection of species. The brave-of-voice, but physically shy scarlet tanager treated me to an extended viewing as I stood near the tree in which he was perched – of course once I fired up the chainsaw to fell a neighboring tree he took offense and sought the solitude of the deeper forest. Observing the colors in nature is a wonderful way to remind oneself of the good things life can provide. From where I sit, it need not be limited to the world out of doors. Color is candy for the eyes. It can evoke feelings, and they can be pleasing or irksome.

The use of color in software is too often overlooked. To be sure, corporations generally have a basic palette that must be in evidence, but too often the combination of colors receives no thought. Nowhere is this more apparent than in business graphics. When information is intended to be communicated through the visual representation of quantitative data, color plays a much larger role than most people know.

Selection of colors to be used in a graph (or the user interface of an application for that matter) should be done with care and thought. In Western cultures red generally denotes something negative, or some kind of warning. This is not universally true, however. In China, for example, it has positive connotations. While red, yellow, and green might be selected for the indication of the relative performance against plans of a particular indicator, constructing the theme of an entire graph or application interface around these three colors is not generally advisable.

As it turns out, you don't have to be an artist to be able to select pleasing color combinations for graphs and other application elements. Since I am no artist, I was very happy to learn this as I worked to guide the development of the new graph engine in our soon to come next release.

Resources are available that will help even the uninitiated gain an understanding of the fundamentals of color theory. Search the Internet for "color wheel" and you'll find a wealth of resources that will give you a solid, simple, and quick introduction to color and its uses. Grab a good color wheel, load it into your favorite image editor, and grab the RGB values of colors that interest you. Apply these to your graphs using setFillColor() and setBorderColor() and you'll be amazed how much more appealing your information is.