Today is Weekly Chart day! 🎉 I just published a little exploration into the wonderful world of data vis background colors. The whole morning I was colorpicking hex codes from data visualizations out there and filled a table – and this afternoon, that table turned into a scatter plot.

It uses my favorite color space these days: OKLCH ← play around with it at this link!

“Sounds complicated,” I hear you saying. “Why not use HSV or HSL? I know HSV and HSL. I don’t know OKLCH.”

Here’s why: OKLCH (and LCH in general) are closer to how we really perceive colors. Here’s the same data in an HSL plot:

You can see that HSL wants us to believe that the very pastel colors in the top right are as saturated (100%) as that crazy intense red in the middle.

HSV is a bit better:

But still: I don’t think the very dark colors in the top left are as saturated as the crazy red.

When looking at the data in LCH (and in its little sister OKLCH), how the colors are placed on the plot make more sense: Desaturated colors are further down than saturated colors.

If you’re wondering about the difference between LCH and OKLCH, here it is: