This bachelor’s thesis focused on an application output for the choice of colour scales while creating maps. Partial aims of the theoretical part were:
Introductory questionnaires served to analyse awareness of cartographers, geoinformation specialists and others regarding existing tools and their subjective opinion of two chosen tools (ColorBrewer 2.0 and Sequential Color Scheme Generator 1.0). On the basis of 104 opinions, 78 % of respondents would appreciate a tool for the choice of colour scales according to colour and 58% of them would be glad for the choice of visual styles. Both of these variant were applied to the final tool.
One of the main outputs of this thesis is a creation of quantitative and qualitative colour scales. A creation of quantitative scales for printed output was based on DCS® BOOK CMYK Professional Edition chart and you can find more information about the proces in chapter 5.1. Consulting with Mgr. Alžběta Brychtová, Ph.D. helped to create quantitative scales for digital output by setting appropriate distance of colours. More information is to be found in chapter 5.2. A total of more than 500 quantitative schemes was created and 45 of them were approved as valid and applicable. The resulting scales are available on the website in online tool section. At first qualitative colour scales were created and then tested by Color blindness simulator which tells us what palette can be used for what colour vision deficiency. The second way of qualitative colour scales creation used Color Hunter tool. It automatically generates colours in the picture to HEX codes. The HEX codes were later transferred to RGB and CMYK codes. With the use of a chart, eight documents with 49 scales in CMYK and RGB were created. Every document was tested for people with colour vision deficiency. Sixty colour palettes with five intervals each were created with Color Hunter. They were created according to the visual styles set by the supervisor. A total of 120 colour palettes was created like this. All the scales were transmitted to text documents for both, CMYK and RGB values. They can be reached through online tool. A total of 107 txt files and 107 pdf files are free to download for users of the online tool. All the colour scales created are available in 77 xml files (in RGB) and a user can download them for free and use a manual in three languages to put it in QGIS 2.12.3 software. They are available in the form of colour charts (Appendix 2).
An eye tracking testing was held for the purpose of this bachelor’s thesis. 45 people participated but due to some inappropriate samples, 40 valid samples were analysed. Chosen distances of colours and ability to distinguish individual intervals of quantitative scales were verified for digital use. A total of 61 testing stimuli was created. Scales with six and nine intervals and two chosen scale from six to maximum of intervals were verified, more information in chapter 6. Number of fixations, time spend on individual stimuli, total number of movements and other data were studied. This experiment resulted in right setting of colour distances. On the basis of the data from this experiment, respondents needed more time for stimulus and higher number of fixations for the scales with more intervals.
It is not possible to use the same method of eye-tracking for verification of scales for printed maps, therefore a suggestion was made. More about it in chapter 6.2. There were 20 respondents for this questionnaire with 80 questions (tasks) and the same type of scales and intervals. On the basis of findings from this questionnaire, some schemes with high number of mistakes were evaluated as inappropriate.
An online tool for providing created qualitative and quantitative scale was created and placed on the website. Users can view all the colour schemes created and download them in pdf, txt or xml files. It is freely available in three languages – Czech, English and German. For more information go to chapter 9.
