Data Visualization "Colors Selections"

The eyes taste colors and determine concepts through them.

Using colors, information can be shown or hidden based on the message or information to be conveyed.

Considerations to build a color wised dashboard:

1. Brand Identity

You want the spirit of your brand reflected in your charts and graphs for your organization. They should look like they belong to your organization. However, you don’t want a sea of the same color.

2. Color Contrast

You need to have enough contrast between your colors and between colors and the background so that people can read and distinguish them.

3. Sequential colors

Used for data sets to show a range of values from low to high, or to highlight or show a selection or variation of data.

4. Diverging colors

When you have a middle amount and 2 groupings. Often used when there’s a 0 in the middle and values go positive/negative. A prominent example of this is when mapping US political parties as red and blue, with lighter tints of each showing weaker partisanship and grey showing an even balance.

5. Unique data

In many organization, there are common data patterns that consistently arise which may need unique color combinations.