Today I read a brilliant paper by two brilliant people, Karen Schloss and Stephen Palmer, called "Aesthetic response to color combinations: preference, harmony, and similarity" (PDF). All the good papers I read before made this really, really good paper even better – because I could appreciate it more. It's basically three or four papers, and it did take me more than 30min to get through it. (I think I need to read the end again because I was kind of tired out by all the brilliance). There are so many good thoughts; so much good reasoning and great methods in there...it made me very happy.

This paper's main statement is that color harmony is not the same as color preference. People can find color combinations harmonic (e.g. light yellow on dark yellow) but not pleasant to look at. That's important, because lots of studies before confused "people think it looks harmonic" with "people like it".

Schloss & Palmer's paper I read is from 2010. Good thing Karen still writes about colors and data visualization as part of her research at the **Schloss Visual Reasoning Lab** – when she writes in that paper, "Future work comparing [something] is underway", then it's likely that she's published that future work, too. It's like a series that came out ten years ago that you just discovered, and now you can binge-watch it all.

And indeed: I downloaded every paper I could find and that had something, anything to do with color. I'm looking forward to reading them.

Besides that, I started reading the color chapter in Colin Ware's "Data Visualization".

And I confirmed to Goof that I will give a 2h workshop in February for Graphic Hunters. That includes a 1h talk and then 30min of a practical part. I'm very excited about the practical part because I want to include exercises and examples of "that's how you choose good colors". I started thinking about how to do, that, too. One way: picking colors from photos:

Quote of the day: "These theories are different enough that, if all their predictions were pooled, nearly every color pair could be considered harmonious!" – Karen Schloss & Steven Palmer

Question of the day: How to publish these little updates of mine? (It's not a question I started asking today, but it's a question that's especially on my mind today.)