Plotting every single colour in Color Scheme

I had the pleasure of interviewing Edith Young for Nightingale to talk about her data and design process with her new book, Color Scheme: An Irreverent History of Art and Pop Culture in Color Palettes (read the interview here). While reading the book, I noticed that Edith had provided a comprehensive index. I had to build a viz with this index! 

Data Structure

I decided to transpose the index into a CSV that contained the columns: Topic/Name of work/CMYK Value/Page #, Theme.

Code/Chart

The chart is built using vanilla Javascript and D3. With the CMYK values in the book, I decided to plot them against lightness and saturation on the colour wheel. I had to convert the CMYK colours to RGB then to HSL in JavaScript to get the values to plot them on the scatterplot. 

Design 

I stayed true to the book by using square colour swatches. I decided to use a dark background for the colours to pop. The “Color Scheme” portion of the book has a function that randomly generates different colours for the letters of the title after a refresh. 

You can find the final visualization on Github here.