On Tuesday, Nov 11, 2003, at 13:34 US/Eastern, Panza, Robin wrote:
Tamara, you've been bemoaning the difficulty of using many colors, because
you have trouble distinguishing among them. Yet you also say not to worry
about the color-blind because they can distinguish shades of gray (or brown,
in this case). If it's a big deal to have to distinguish between purple and
blue (or red and orange, etc.), how can it not be a big deal to have to
distinguish between shades of the same color?
Sorry, I must not have expressed myself precisely. I don't have problems distinguishing between varoius shades *per se*; if I had, I'd be staying away from laces like Polychrome and coloured Milanese. My problems arise from the inconsistency of the printing process. Happens all the time from one publication to the next but, sometimes, even within the same publication (probably depending on the submitted copy). So, the "purple" can be anythinvg from mauve, through lilac, through purple, to navy. The red can be red but also orange or even brownish orange (3 different stitches). The yellow can be yellow, or orange, or light brown (ditto). The green will have many shades (grass, jade, turquoise) some of which are almost light blue -- a different stitch.
That's OK, as long as the pattern uses only a few colours; I can, usually, determine by position and function whether it's really supposed to be red or orange. I don't follow a coloured diagram stitch-by stitch; I use the colours as a general guide -- this area in half, this in cloth, etc. But, in a complex pattern, which uses many stitches, often changing frequently things can get hairy, if every stitch is supposed to be a different colour but the printing process is imprecise, and variable.
This is made more difficult where colour code is used but not explained, or explained by the editor, who may be using the same colour, but in a different shade. In the first case, you can never be sure what the author *meant*. In the second, you get purple in the "legend", but navy blue in the diagram... :)
That's why I'd advocate the reduction of the colour code to 2, at most 3 colours (besides the black), supplemented by cross-hatchings (to denote twists). The various shades of red (or purple, or green, or whatever colours it was decided to use) produced by the printer would cease to matter -- orange, red, reddish-brown, even brown would all mean *one* thing, not three.
As for distinguishing between shades of one colour... I know Poland was about 50 yrs behind US in technology, but you might still have seen some black and white photos? That's what I grew up with, and b&w films and TV as well. I had no trouble distinguishing between a blonde and a dark-haired person, or telling where a face ended and the blonde hair started, or whether someone wore a dark sweater with a black skirt rather than a black dress. Yet it was all shades of grey... Same's true about putting together a sky in a jig-saw puzzle; I do it by shades (my son does is, mostly, by shapes of pieces -- something that's totally beyond me) of that single colour.
Sometimes, I will use colour in my diagrams but, not knowing how it'll be published, I'll copy it in b&w, to see whether there's still any difference. Given a good choice of the basic colours, there is -- at least to my eyes. Jean Leader's series on beginning Bucks Point, published in Lace a couple of years back, used only shades of grey -- yet the diagrams were clear enough to read, if not as obvious as coloured ones would have been
So I still don't think a colour code would be that big a deal, even for the colour-blind people, provided the colours were few and distinctive enough. Those who don't care about colour in diagrams (like Bev), could ignore it. Those who can't see colour, could probably still distinguish between those few shades. Those who like colour-coded diagrams (like myself) would be happy...
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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