Member-only story

Perplexity diverges with color

Here, I explore the use of Perplexity, a text-based generative AI model, as a color suggestion tool for building diverging color schemes to include in your data visualizations. A diverging color scheme fuses two sequential color schemes, each with different hues, together with a shared neutral midpoint color. Colors increase in darkness to represent differences in both directions from the meaningful mid-range data point. Successful results are based on examining and sometimes modifying the specific Perplexity color Hex code suggestions.

Let’s begin by exploring details about Perplexity as a generative AI and then examine how divergence is created with sequential color schemes. In this writing, I also note the new interface to the Adobe Color app.

A Brief Overview of Generative AI Chatbots:

Presently, there are seven popular Generative AI chatbots in wide usage: Open AI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, DeepSeek , xAI’s Grok and Perplexity AI, Inc. (noted as simply Perplexity). Users can ask these chatbots for assistance in tasks such as web searching, creating emails, essays, and code.

For this writing, I am focusing on Perplexity. The chatbot is designed as a large language…