The use of color in visual displays

Technical advances have given as enormous increase in the possiblities to use color for the representation of information, and have increased the risk of expectations of color’s usefulness being too high. Unfortunately the technical progress has not been accompanied by a proportional increase in knowledge about useful employment of color. In other words, color is in many cases applied in a silly, sometimes even very unprofitable way. In particular, the application of pseudocoloring, i.e., the transformation of unidimensional brightness differences into multidimensional color differences, easily leads to problems if the transformation is not well chosen.