Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Getting better color schemes...

I'm making good progress in finding color schemes that actually make sense. As a sneak peak, I've posted a video of a tour over the median household income data from the 2000 Census by County. Green is low median income and red is high (the other way around, which may be more logical there is just way too much red on the screen). The main hurdle I am working on now is how to reduce the file size. The file shown in the movie is ~7 mb.



Here are some of the color schemes that I have put together by hand (enough of the auto-hex code generation that led me to a random walk across hues & saturations). The movie above uses the scheme third from left.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You mentioned that you are looking to reduce file sizes of the resulting KMZs.

Have you tried reducing the precision of your latitude/longitude pairs? Four digits of precision gives you accuracy to within 40-50 feet. I found that the census boundary polygons are often specified at absurd levels of precision (8-10) digits. Reducing all these numbers can really cut down on your file sizes.

What I did for the census data on the Juice Analytics website. All the latitude/longitude pairs were rounded to the nearest 0.0001.

Keep up the great work. I love what you're doing.