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How to Choose a Visualization

Color

Tools to Help Pick Colours

https://colorbrewer2.org/

Web tool for guidance in choosing choropleth map color schemes, based on the research of Dr. Cynthia Brewer. Built and maintained by Axis Maps.

projects.susielu.com/viz-palette 

Create and test pallets for your visualizations on pre-existing data visualizations.

tristen.ca/hcl-picker

Mathematicly calculated colour palettes.  

Colorpicker for Data is built off Gregor Aisch's article How To Avoid Equidistant HSV Colors and the color conversion library chroma.js.

Colour Best Practices

Don't use unnecessary colour. In this example, the x-axis already labels the categories (a,b,c,d), so differentiating by colour is not needed.

 

 

 

Avoid using too many colours, people can become confused and overwhelmed. Some sources say no more than 6, some say no more than 10, in one visualization.

 

 

 

Types of palettes:
Top = sequential data (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Change the intensity of a hue.
Middle = categories (e.g. math, science, languages, etc.). Use colours with distinctly different names.
Bottom = diverging (e.g. -2 °c,  -1 °c, 0 °c, 1 °c, 2 °c ). Use 2 hues with different names that merge in the middle. 

 

 

<Always consider cultural implication of colour (e.g. green= good and red=bad, blue=cold and red=hot, etc.)

 

 

People who are colour blind might have a hard time differentiating these colours, so avoid these combinations:
  • Red & green
  • Green & brown
  • Green & blue
  • Blue & gray
  • Blue & purple
  • Green & gray
  • Green & black

 

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