I was in a genetics graduate program when this was published, and this spread like wildfire.
This fork shows an older version with all the shapes turned on and filled with original colors: https://observablehq.com/d/4a5120e490fa9da4
Santiago Ortiz's venn was from 2013 (via archive.org) . I had forgotten I'd seen that, thanks for sharing.
But maybe someone knows a more general or robust solution - or a better way to achieve this? In the future, I’d like to be able, for example, to find the intersection between two Venn diagrams of three sets each etc.
In some sense, they "lucked out" by dealing with a prime number of primary color sets, which helped them avoid having multiple pairs of colors that are directly across the wheel from each other.
Very nicely done. It's fun to play with, and inspiring to study.
"Lawn green" and "medium spring green" look completely identical to me. Maybe I have a really obscure kind of color blindness?
The author's mistake was this: "[my colors] are equidistant in the hue circle". The problem is that the hue circle (at least under the parameterization scheme he used) is not uniform over discrimination, i.e., the ability to discriminate two hues is not invariant under displacing them an equal amount along the circle. (I presume this is one of those situation where it's misleading to think about three primary colors on equal footing because of quirks of human vision biology.)
First, the author could have chosen 7 hues at max-saturation that were easier to discriminate than this. But more importantly, he should have used the other color axes: saturation and brightness. dark red (~maroon) and light red (~pink) are a lot easier to discriminate, even when not next to each other, than the two shades of green he used.
On mobile it is uncanny valley - I see something, but it is broken.
The 3D one works somewhat well if the spheres are translucent and animated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram#Extensions_to_hig...
https://chatgpt.com/share/690f675d-c340-8013-b598-41fe487b4e...
It has the nice properties that you can do any number of sets (in theory) and all the boundary intersections are either osculating or perpendicular.
Anyone knows what could cause this?
In popular terminology they are very often confused with Euler Diagrams [0] which represent meaningful relations in sets but not all possible. You shouldn't create Euler Diagrams this complex, but the raison d'etre of Venn diagrams is to visualize the complex nature of set relations.
https://bombmanual.com/web/index.html#ComplicatedWires
However you could make a good argument that having a complicated and confusing diagram is the point of that puzzle.
The possible resulting combinations also seem to have remained in the code, going from tame concepts like "illustration" and "games", down to gems like "folksonomy", "hypernarrative", "facebook" (??)
