Color Your Data Viz Like a Pro
And ditch those default color palettes.
My first series of 2021 is “5 Data Viz Resolutions to Make in 2021.”
This is #2: spending time on better color palettes.
This may sound easy enough, but there are tons of articles out there that talk about how to best use color in your data viz, with considerations like:
What kind of palette or color scheme is the best to represent the data story?
How to solve for color-blindness or meet accessibility guidelines?
How do colors look across platforms/charts/large volume of categories?
What do certain colors mean or inherently inspire in people?
What colors should you shy away from?
And so much more.
Then there is the question of what specific colors to use. I’m not a color expert or a UI/UX designer, but I am a citizen data viz builder/viewer who, like most humans, is attracted to pretty colors — which can get me into a lot of trouble if I’m left to choose them willy nilly.
And one thing I’ve always struggled with is creating a pleasing color palette from scratch.
So if you also want to kickstart your most colorful year, then this short list of resources is for you.
Thanks a lot, Canva. Now I’m hungry and realizing my prior color choices weren’t great!First and foremost — let’s learn best practices of using color in our data viz.
- Here is a particularly detailed and thoughtful article by Elijah Meeks on using and testing color combinations in your data viz. This one is so good it might deserve a post of its own
- Search for “data viz color” within popular data communities like Storytelling with Data, Medium, or Story by Data
- Spend some time browsing the Tableau Public Gallery, Viz of the Day, and Featured Authors for inspiration (or tool of your choosing)
Then we’ll need tools to find those pretty colors.
One thing that dashboarding tools HAVE done is provided great flexibility for people to customize to our hearts’ content — and that includes color palettes. One thing that they have NOT done is provided some enticing color palettes out-of-the-box, or built-in tools to select good ones.
In fact, it is almost like dashboard tools have gone out of their way to make their default color palettes nondescript and “blah,” resulting in a bunch of “blah” visualizations floating around that could otherwise be pretty neat.
This is crime against good data when you could not only use color to more effectively tell your data story, but to add engagement and intrigue in a world already succumbing to death by dashboard.
Luckily, several quick (and fun) options pop up when you search for “color palette generator” like:
- Canva (where you can upload a photo of pastel donuts and get a matching color palette, browse pre-made palettes, or read about the symbolism of different colors — all of this in addition to Canva’s other super-user-friendly and convenient graphics creation capabilities)
- Viz Palette (specifically built for data visualizations and accessibility — pair this with the article I mentioned above)
- Coolors (a super-fast random color scheme generator)
- Colormind (color selection powered by AI)
- and Paletton (which I played with a while back and found so simple, I summed it up in one graphic)
Finally, for sake of ease/consistency/and to minimize manual formatting work, I recommend importing your custom palettes into your dashboarding tool. This is a slightly more advanced topic on account of what is required to do it, and that deserves its own post. For now, here is a search to get you overachievers started.
Color is a gift that even the most monochromatic can appreciate.
You may even find yourself asking how something so “simple” completely changed your user’s perception of the dashboard. When wielded right, it is also another tool in our data tool box, our UI/UX toolbox, and even our creative toolbox.
That’s right — you are creating art. So choose your colors wisely.
Originally published at https://stefanygoradia.bio on January 12, 2021.
