Module 4 : Color Concepts and Choropleth Mapping

 This week's lab was focused on learning about color schemes, ColorBrewer, and color. We were tasked with using different color schemes to reflect the data being presented. Data being sequential, divergent, or qualitative. We also learned how to normalize data and effectively choose a classification to better support the data being represented. We also utilized ColorBrewer as a guide to how to edit RGB values and what makes an effective and vibrant color scheme. We were tasked with creating three color ramps based on linear progression, adjusted progression, and ColorBrewer.

The first color ramp is depicting linear progression which is where the RGB values increase by a set value that was calculated by the following formula: Highest value-lowest value/number of classes = total. This results in color going from light to dark or dark to light.

I decided to use purple as my choice of color and got the following color ramp:

The next color ramp is depicting adjusting progression which is where the values of RGB increase as the colors darken or the value is higher and decreases as the values are lower and the color is lighter. This makes the darker colors vibrant and can be easily differentiated. My color ramp ended up looking like this: 

The last color ramp is from ColorBrewer.  This tool is a sort of cheat sheet to pick a color ramp based on the number of classes, the data type, and whether or not HSV, RGB, or CMYK is being used. For this ramp; five classes were selected, the sequential data was selected, and RGB was used. Since I was using purple, I picked the closest color ramp to what I was using and received the following results:

As seen, the colors are much more vibrant and different allowing viewers to easily see how the colors differentiate. 

Our last task was to create a choropleth map of a specific state and the population change from 2010 to 2014 in each county. I selected Georgia and used a manual interval classification with five classes and a diverging color scheme. I chose this to show where counties had a decrease in population and which counties had an increase based on color. The decreasing values are shown in blue-green and increasing values  are shown in red-orange.