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Color coding

Nature Methods volume 7, page 573 (2010)Cite this article

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Color can add dimensionality and richness to scientific communications. In figures, color is typically used to differentiate information into classes. The challenge is picking colors that are discriminable. A systematic approach to choosing colors can help us find a lineup effective for color coding.

Occasionally, authors use a sequence of colors, such as the 'rainbow' color scheme, to represent a range of values. Color, however, is not ideal for encoding quantitative data because of the inherent ambiguity in how the different colors should be ordered. For instance, does yellow represent a smaller value than blue? One could pattern the sequence after the ordering of visible light by wavelength (remembered by the mnemonic ROYGBIV), but use of this color spectrum is inherently problematic. The transitions from red to yellow to green and so on are uneven, breaking the correspondence between color and numerical value. Visually, certain colors in the rainbow spectrum seem to run on, whereas others are short lived. Even when we limit the spectrum to just a few colors, the incremental change in mapped value still might not translate to the magnitude of change we see.

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Figure 1: Perception of color can vary.
Figure 2: Color has hue, saturation and brightness.

References

  1. Albers, J. Interaction of Color (Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, USA, 1975).

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  1. Bang Wong is the creative director of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.,

    Bang Wong

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  1. Bang Wong
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Wong, B. Color coding. Nat Methods 7, 573 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth0810-573

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