It's said that (for those of us with full visual faculties) we process something like 80% of what we learn visually. Color-coding, shading and graphs are some ways of marking differences between between values and degrees of value, helping us digest large amounts of complex information in a single glance. Consider the political map, with each country, state, county, or other subdivision in a different color. "Red" states and "blue" states. Degrees of obesity per state. And so on.

Consider the color-coded diagram of the human digestive system. Red stomach, yellow intestines, pink colon, green gallbladder, brown liver. What color is your pancreas? Do you want to color it in World Diabetes Day blue to indicate yours has died?

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Too often, we look at the 7-day, 14-day, and 30-day trends on our blood glucose monitors, see numbers that look great (or horrid), and rather than seeing an A1c that confirms those readings, we get a number that would appear to have come completely out of left field. (Or Mars. Or the Andromeda Galaxy. It's hard to say exactly where.) We can either scratch our heads and wonder why the numbers aren't correlating, or we can take out our manual readings logs, our meter downloads, our CGM downloads, and our personal journals and try to figure "what we are doing wrong".

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