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Work the five delivered sources into the pages
The source-request loop paid for itself immediately — two of the five corrected something rather than confirming it. The Economist piece settles V1, the riskiest live claim, but our note had over-claimed: truncating the scale is its *first* example, not one of "several." Note rewritten to quote her. The same article turned out to contain a dual-axis chart she caught herself on, now cited. Datawrapper's color-scale part 1 refuted the assumption behind a queued sin outright: it makes no argument against rainbow scales and endorses multi-hue sequential gradients. The rainbow entry is now marked as having no verified source at all, rather than ample backing. The dual-axis post independently draws the same line we drew last turn — of four uses only the alternative-scale case survives, their example being F against C — and led to two references worth more than the blog post: the Isenberg et al. study that tested dual-scale charts, and Few's article working through the cases. Both ship without full metadata rather than guessed metadata; queued. Pie and stacked posts gave verbatim support, plus one correction: a 100%-stacked chart has two readable baselines, not one. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ULE5RRxdQE1ebwefEd2eCM
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# Datawrapper — "Which color scale to use when visualizing data" (part 1 of 4)
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Lisa Charlotte Muth, `blog.datawrapper.de/which-color-scale-to-use-in-data-vis/`,
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**16 March 2021**. Supplied as PDF, read 2026-08-05. Partly answers queue row 3.
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## This does not say what I assumed it said
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I had queued this expecting it to condemn rainbow/spectral scales, and wrote in
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the backlog that the series was "the best free treatment of this anywhere" for
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that purpose. **Part 1 makes no such argument.** It is a taxonomy — categorical
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vs sequential vs diverging, classed vs unclassed — and its closing section is
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called "It's not as clear-cut as it seems."
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Worse for my assumption, it actively softens the single-hue rule:
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> You can use only one hue in your sequential gradients (e.g., light blue to
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> dark blue) – but almost all examples I show here use multiple hues (e.g.,
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> light yellow to dark blue). Using two or even more hues increases the color
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> contrast between segments of your gradient, making it easier for readers to
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> distinguish between them.
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So "sequential must be one hue" is **not** a rule we can attribute here, and a
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future rainbow sin must not be written as though multi-hue gradients are the
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problem. The problem with rainbow scales is non-monotonic lightness and implied
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banding, which is a different claim needing a different source.
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## What it is good for
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- Clean definitions of categorical / sequential / diverging, and classed vs
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unclassed, if a future sin needs to explain the vocabulary.
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- The framing that a color scale is a *mapping* to data, same as any axis.
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- Its own reference list points at Robert Simmon's *Subtleties of Color* (2013)
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and Wilke's color-scales chapter — both plausible homes for the actual
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rainbow argument.
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## Still needed for the rainbow sin
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Parts 2, 3 and 4 of this series, and Kosara's "How The Rainbow Color Map
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Misleads" (referenced by search results, never read). Re-queued. Until one of
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those is in hand, the rainbow sin has **no** verified source and should not be
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drafted.
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