Coloring for the White Collared

This week, I find myself working on a requirements traceability document.

The goal of the document is truly requirements traceability:  identifying the source of the requirement and whether or not that makes the requirement out of scope.

Now, as it turns out, one of my colleagues is rather fond of color-coding.  I opened up this document and it looked like Rainbow Brite threw up on it.  And then to kick off the meeting, my colleague wanted to know what color to use for today's meeting...

Uhm...

I am NOT fond of color-coding documents.  After being married to two color blind men, I kind of get the hint that color-coding is kind of a dumb idea.

Why?

Because the two most common colors in color coding are what?

Green and Red

What is the most common form of color blindness?

Green and Red

What type of information are you really expecting to convey to people in gray?  The common colors aren't even different saturations, so they LOOK the same to a color blind person.

See, dumb.

It's much better to identify your content with, uhm, WORDS.

Despite the color palate provided by Microsoft, there are really only 7 different colors that the human eye can distinguish.  And you all know what they are already:

ROY G BIV

Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

Everything else is a shade or tone of those hues.

Whoa, fancy artist speak there.

Hue is the actual color; adding white or black creates a different tone of the color.  But basically, I go back to what I learned from Crayola:

In a box of 64 crayons,  I still have to look at the label to tell the difference between Yellow Orange and Orange Yellow or Blue Green and Green Blue.  

Now, I will give you this:  I can tell the difference between pink and red.  I think most people can- even the color blind.

And this is because they are different tones of the same color.

So, I guess my advice is this:

If you want to be Rainbow Brite and vomit colors all over your business documents:

• Use different values/saturations of colors- don't use the same darkness of all colors for your coloring
• If you have more than 7 colors, you're painting.  Stop.  Color in coloring books, not business documents.
• Please, please, please:  Use a freakin' legend.  Some of us can't understand how your artistic expression relates to due dates.