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Comment by nickh | Hacker News Reader

On the home page, it says "lighter is more popular, darker is less." That's the inverse of what people expect. I recommend switching it around.

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That's interesting... I seem to intuitively think that brighter/lighter is more popular and darker/dimmer is less popular. I wonder what the ratio is overall of people's perceptions. Upvote this comment if you think lighter is more popular (the parent comment had a vote of 8 when I posted this comment).

I would agree with you if the colors were against a dark background. But as it is, dark colors contrast more with the white/gray background, and thus get visual priority over the light colors.

I agree with nickh. Darker should be more popular. Look at your Google Analytics chart: dark green means more visitors than light green. White means no data/no info. So that's a more natural gradation.

Without reading the legends, looking at the map, I almost expected the darker shade to be more popular, and when I clicked on results for more common hispanic names like Juan or so, I was surprised. And then read the legend to find that its other way round. But very kool app!

Why? In all honesty I've never seen it done your way before. Lighter=weaker impact=less. Darker=stronger impact=more.

Especially as your using red! light red / pink is a very wishy washy colour and the darker reds draw the eye much more easily.

He's right actually, I just went to the site and went through the entire list thinking "Wow Brooklyn is more popular than you'd think", then I glanced down at the color legend and realized Darker meant "LESS" and kind of chuckled.

I think it's a matter of bold vs less bold, not dark vs light.

Thanks for the feedback, I have made those changes, and I think you're right, it looks better:

http://www.babynameclusters.com/d/hn-feedback

and

http://www.babynameclusters.com/map/Male

And you need to tweak things to make the differential in colours more distinct. Perhaps a range from yellow to red or something.

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