Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Color?

A better title would talk about "Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Color in Data Visualization"

I initially thought the article would talk about colours in the design sense, and in which case engineers shouldn't worry whatsoever. It's not their job.

I've only read partway into this article, but I really don't understand what he's saying in the section "Misleading Use of Color in Your Data". I literally didn't have a single one of the problems he listed with the colored representations. I don't see color banding, and I don't have trouble distinguishing various shades of green-to-cyan. Also, I think the third grayscale image in Figure 2 is really misleading, since it's showing a 2D cross-section as if it were 3D.

Used properly, the colorscale (is that a word?) should give 3x the amount of data as grayscale, which I think is clearly shown in the fourth image.

For those wondering, I believe the visualizations on this page were created with OpenDX (http://opendx.org/) or its predecessor from IBM.

I think "the rule" should be very simple: if your data has just one parameter, don’t use colors! The gray scale will give you the only faithful representation of the data.