Forbidden Color Combinations?

Color theorists and designers in fashion or computer graphics have coined phrases based around what colors shouldn’t go together.

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The 11 Best Movie-Effect Photoshop Tutorials

11 of the best tutorials that make your photos look like the movies. From Scarface to Pirates of the Carribean to '300' to A Scanner Darkly. It's all here.http://photojojo.com/content/tutorials/best-movie-effect-photo-tutorials-photoshop/

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Pie charts being replaced by "pixel charts"?

An interesting infographic trend: Square blocks of color are now being used to represent percentage-based statistics instead of the traditional pie chart. Some recent examples are shown here.













The chart on the left is from a NY Times story on atheism and the afterlife, making its choice of colors seem a little weird. And is that empty white block in the center supposed to represent the empty hole in our souls? On the right, a detail from a Wired story on how much Americans spend on gadgets. Charles M. Blow created the graphic for the Times; Arno Ghelfi did the honors for Wired.

This switch raises some interesting questions.

• Is the square format more familiar to readers now because of the preponderance of the pixel in pop culture?
• There's a lot of leeway in choosing the shape of individual regions, since the only constraint is that they use the proper number of squares -- what are the best practices here?
• Finally, a productive use of all that time spent playing Tetris?
• How come it took so long to figure out that pie charts are pretty hard to actually glean data from?
• Was there a "Designing For Print" conference somewhere six months ago where a speaker made a particularly compelling case for squares over circles?
  

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