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Histogram Color

XanGregg

The most prominent color change for JMP 7 is the histogram color. Feedback from users and experts told use that the bright green of JMP of old put too much emphasis on the bars themselves at the expense the overall shape and other adornments, such as fitted distribution curves.

JMP Histogram sample

For JMP 7, the color is a more neutral greenish gray, allowing fitted curves of all colors to show up well.

Comments

WP_Comment

Xan Gregg wrote:

You should be able to look at that saved script (after the manual coloring) and use it as a template for adding coloring to your script. For more specific help, tech support is probably your best bet.

WP_Comment

Martina wrote:

Thanks for your promt reply. IÂ´m creating a loop to get an overlay plot for each value of one column. So I know I can change colors manually and then save the graphic and next time I open it the color is still changed. But I would like to put a statement into my script so that each time I use the loop to create the plots the colors are already changed and I dont have to do this manually. the colors IÂ´d like to change are the colors of the variables I put in the "group by" statement in the overlay plot. I also now that I can change the colors of the values of the variable (column) manually in the data table. but the loop should create the plot not depending on the data table you open.

WP_Comment

Xan Gregg wrote:

Martina, I may need a little more info to understand your question, but in general if you use Save Script after you've manually adjusted colors, your changes will be preserved in the script and reapplied next time you run that script.

JMP 8 (forthcoming) adds some global preferences for colors.

WP_Comment

Martina wrote:

I wonder if its possible to - instead of using the Column Property "Value Colors" to change the color for each value of a column - integrate a statement into my script so I dont have to change the colors manually each time I use a script to create a graphic. So that the colors are automatically changed through a statement in the script after I open the data table and before the graphic is created. Does there any statement exist to do this?

WP_Comment

N Clark wrote:

I agree completely Jared. In another post (I believe) the reason behind the color changes were talked about, but you are right that there should be something else available. In my opinion, to change something at basic as the color palette w/o the option for the "old" version was not the best choice at all.

WP_Comment

Jared Shaw wrote:

I don't mind the new color for the distributions, but I have found that the entire default palette has been changed. What use to show up clearly as red, green, blue, etc. is now a washed out. I am getting so many pinks in multi-level or stacked bar graphs, that it has become very difficult to ascertain where one level ends and another begins. In a recent notification to SAS/JMP Tonya Mauldin specified that the colors could be manually changed to what we would like to see. This is correct. But I have several scripts that ran in JMP 6 and were very clear. However, when I run them in version 7, as I have explained the color palette is washed out, kind-of easterish looking. My customers do not like these new colors and I don't have the time to go in and manually change them for every section of a stacked bar graph. I would hope that the users would have the option to choose in preferences what color palette they want to use. Can you please provide an update as soon as possible?

WP_Comment

Xan Gregg wrote:

Good point on the Ctrl click, Dave. That may be something we can add in the next maintenance release.

We are working on more color options for the future, including color-blind friendly palettes. More to your issue, there is a fix in the 7.0.1 release for better contrast on customized histogram colors.

WP_Comment

Dave Martin wrote:

Many other JMP features let you click Ctrl while clicking the hot spot to make the changes on all charts in the report. Why not add this feature to the menu options for bar colors?

By the way, I am a little color blind, and with the old color, when you clicked on a bar, the red color really stood out on all the charts. The more muted default color makes it harder to see the contrast with the lit up bars.

WP_Comment

Nathan Clark wrote:

Excellent to hear that more customization will be in 7.0.1. I've used the Value Colors many times to save time with changing colors around.

I can't say I know of a palette that works well for R/G deficiencies since I typically just choose colors that look different to me. I really don't know what colors I choose (unless someone asks "why in the world did you use mauve?" or something similar). However, if JMP is interested, I'll keep better track of what colors work for me so other R/G people can benefit.

Thanks again!

Nathan

WP_Comment

Xan Gregg wrote:

Thanks for feedback, Nathan. Global custom colors are sorely lacking for users like you. We are working to add a global histogram color preference for JMP 7.0.1 for people who like the bright green bars.

For now, individual colors are customizable in general -- you're no longer limited to our 65 standard colors for markers, for instance.

There's also a Column Property called Value Colors that may help in some situations. For instance, if in Big Class I add a Value Color property to the Age column, I can tell JMP which color to use for each value of age. Then when JMP needs to color by age, such as Group By age followed by Fit Line in Bivariate, it will use those colors.

Regarding your comments on generally muted colors, that change was based on reports that saturated colors are harder on the eyes and look less "professional".

We'll have more color options in future versions. If you find a palette that works well with R/G deficiencies, please let us know. We've had surprisingly little feedback from that perspective, even during the JMP 7 beta test period with the new palette.

WP_Comment

Nathan wrote:

Xan,

Thanks for all the talk about color. I was just talking to support about this today. I don't like the histogram colors at all. They are too muted for my liking, and I really enjoyed the green colors as before.

Not to put a damper in all the research, but why not allow the user to change the default color in JMP? You can change many of the other preferences this way, but color is usually left out.

I make this comment also as someone with R/G color deficiencies. No, I don't see everything in gray scale (a common misconception), but I do have problems with some colors. For instance, JMP red and green are very close for me to see, and I don't like that those colors are two of the three defaults (I would love to change those to red, black, and blue).

I don't think JMP has done a lot to "think" about those with color perception issues. I agree that changes should be made for the larger portion of the population, but I think the ideal would be more default customization.

One note about JMP 7 color is that the palette looks much more muted for all colors for me. That it not nearly as appealing to the eye as I need it to be. I prefer the palette of 6 much more, and would love to be able to use it.

While I don't have the answers as to the best way to implement this, I would have no problem being involved in any discussions about color for future revisions.

Again, thanks for the information though, it was great to learn the "why's" behind why JMP does what it does:)

Nathan

WP_Comment

brent wrote:

I have great success copying a JMP chart into Adobe Illustrator and deleting all the excess lines and borders. Everything looks clean and vector-graphics-y except for: rotated text, which I have to delete and re-make, and some curved lines (like the fitted normal curve above), which are actually made of little line segments.

I honestly think JMP would suffer from a lot more graph-customizing capability. The quickness and consistency of graphing style (and the sheer number of graphs automatically produced) is (from my perspective) JMP's greatest strength. I use JMP-IN 5.1.2, though, so who knows what I'm missing now...

WP_Comment

Xan Gregg wrote:

Thanks for the comment, anon. Making more graph details customizable is something else we worked on in JMP 7, though the level of customization varies from graph to graph. In this case, yes, you can remove the borders from the histogram bars. Right-click and choose Customize from the menu. Then in the Customize dialog, set the line width for the histogram to 0.

WP_Comment

Anonymous wrote:

Thank you for taking so much care to review and improve the finest details of JMP (including color spaces.)

Please tell me - can I also remove the remaining "chartjunk" that has nothing to do with the data? I would like to make-default the removal of useless black line borders for example.