Practical Color Theory for People Who Code
What I found really useful about this was how the presentation laid it out in a way where I could really understand it. For the first time, I got a simple set of concepts behind choosing colors. Without going back to the article, just what I remembered:<p>1) Choose complements.
2) Mix them with each other until they dull down a bit
3) Make some other neutral color ( possibly by mixing them in equal parts ? ) and then you have 3 colors, and you&#x27;ve got a basis.<p>( OK -- just considering is there any connection between color theory and the basis of a vector field? )<p>So what I liked about this was it taught me something I didn&#x27;t know.<p>I accept there are a lot of comments by experts on here about how this simplified presentation is wrong in such and such a way. I don&#x27;t think that decreases its utility for me.<p>To a novice, just having something tangible to understand is the first step. I understand how to experts, it seems like the wrong advice. But I felt I understood it, and that&#x27;s invaluable.<p>If you don&#x27;t know what I mean by this, maybe it&#x27;s better explained by something a professor said to me in grad school, &quot;The trick to teaching is to trick people into thinking they understand it. Don&#x27;t show them all the complexity. Show them a simplified model. Let them come to it in stages.&quot;<p>I think that&#x27;s true. It stuck with me and it seems true. It also matches what I see my science education was like looking back -- a presentation of a series of models, over a number of years, that gradually layered in more and more complexity, but at a pace that was comfortable. This &quot;chain of models&quot; mostly agreed with each other, but the points where they contradicted each other didn&#x27;t to my memory negatively impact learning, instead they served as signposts that made each model more distinct and aided in remembering them.<p>Also, there is this great feeling of being able to say, &quot;Yes from the perspective of model X that is true, but when you factor in what model Y says, you get a different picture. Here, let me show you.&quot; That always sounds like a true expert. I like that and it also seems like having a bunch of models, not all in perfect agreement, in fact strengthened by the points where they do differ, gives overall a far richer picture of the topic.<p>The strongest idea that stayed with me from my science education was that &quot;everything is a model&quot; and &quot;none of them are true&quot; but some of them are useful. Different models, with different levels of faithfulness to evidence.<p>My main critique of what I will label the &quot;dismissive expert answers&quot; is that they posit a inflexible model of the &quot;absolute truth&quot;, which, I say is, given by itself: not that useful ( at least to learn the topic ), and not really true ( because well, no model can be ).<p>I am sorry if this length comment is more suited as a blog post. Maybe I should just make blog posts instead of comments and link to the article. Maybe that&#x27;s better than anyone. I&#x27;m not trying to offend any experts or do anything ego based, just push back against the what I feel were dismissive answers that missed another side of the value of this article. I wanted to share what I thought that other side of the value of this article was.<p>It does seem like a highly personal comment, just from my point of view. I hope it&#x27;s been useful to some others to read it!