[thelist] How to Make a Set of Different Random Colors
Luther, Ron
Ron.Luther at hp.com
Thu Aug 14 08:39:45 CDT 2008
Fred Jones noted:
>>I am making charts on the fly but all data is dynamic,
>>including the number of elements. How can I generate nice
>>colors so that each slice of the pie chart will be a different,
>>unique, yet BRIGHT color? I am using this now:
>>the last slice, which may be 13, maybe a bit more.
Hi Fred,
I see two approaches. Let's start with the 'easy' one. Let's say you need to chart a maximum of 15 different pie slices. (I'm pretty sure Tufte would say that's too many - but eh, whatcha gonna do?) Go into your favorite color picking application and select your favorite 40-ish eyebleeding shades and load those into a small table indexed on some numeric id field. Now mod your app to randomly select numbers from 1 to 40 and pull the color values out of this small table. You will always get colors you like (or colors you evilly pre-selected specifically to give your CEO a migraine) and they will appear 'random' enough to keep your audience smiling. Done.
>>Anyone who understands colors a bit more have any better suggestions?
I don't think you're talking to me here, but you could approach this the 'hard' way and build some application like Agave but get it to work on a random number of shades instead of a tetrad. Selecting the initial random tetrad shouldn't be too tough. But then I think you would need to spawn secondary tetrads [1] off the initial tetrad and then randomly restrict the result set to the number of slices you need. Good luck with that route. Sounds like it could be a fun little project, but it may take a while to get the results you want.
HTH,
RonL.
[1] (and possibly tertiary if you need enough pie slices - cut back on the pie, dude)
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