CS-GY 9223 - Fall 2025 - Perception and Color in Practice
NYU Tandon School of Engineering
2025-09-15
Today’s Topics: - Intro to D3 - Hands-on exploration of perceptual principles - Creating effective color palettes - Using ColorBrewer and accessibility tools
Intro to D3 and SVG (20 min)
Working with color and accesssibility (20 min)
Hands-on Exercise (40 min)
Let’s complete this workbook to get a feel for D3
Let’s go over some basics about optimising color and clarity
Visit: colorbrewer2.org
Key Features: - Data classes: 3-12 levels - Nature of data: Sequential, Diverging, Qualitative - Colorblind safe options - Print friendly options - Photocopy safe options
** Recommended Practice 3:** 1. Create a 5-class sequential scheme for temperature data 2. Create a diverging scheme for election results 3. Create a categorical scheme for 7 different categories
Tools to test your visualizations: - Coblis - Color Blindness Simulator - Sim Daltonism (Mac app) - Chrome DevTools (Rendering tab → Emulate vision deficiencies)
WCAG Guidelines: - Normal text: 4.5:1 contrast ratio - Large text: 3:1 contrast ratio - Graphics: 3:1 contrast ratio
Best for ordered data from low to high
// D3 sequential color scales
const colorScale = d3.scaleSequential()
.domain([0, 100])
.interpolator(d3.interpolateBlues);
Best for data with meaningful midpoint
// D3 diverging color scales
const colorScale = d3.scaleDiverging()
.domain([-50, 0, 50])
.interpolator(d3.interpolateRdBu);
Best for nominal/categorical data
Fork and complete the notebook linked here
✅ Perception Principles: - Use position when accuracy matters most - Leverage pre-attentive features for important data - Apply Gestalt principles for grouping
✅ Color Best Practices: - Match color scale to data type - Always test for accessibility - Limit categorical colors to ~7
✅ Accessibility: - 8-10% of males have color vision deficiency - Always provide redundant encodings - Test contrast ratios
Perception: - Ware - Information Visualization: Perception for Design - Cleveland & McGill Paper
Color: - ColorBrewer - D3 Color Schemes - Datawrapper Color Palette Guide
Accessibility: - WCAG Guidelines - Inclusive Design Principles
Week 4: Model Assessment and Performance Metrics - Confusion matrices visualization - ROC curves - Performance dashboards
Preparation: - Review basic ML metrics - Install scikit-learn if not already installed
TA Office Hours: TBD (will announce on Discord)
Contact: Parikshit Solunke - pss442@nyu.edu
Discord: Please post questions in #week3-lab channel