Avoid having two colors with the same hue, but different lightness and saturation, unless the values associated with those colors are related. Too much difference might suggest that some colors are more important than others – though this can be a useful property when used deliberately. Additional variation between colors can be obtained through adjusting lightness and saturation, but it’s a good idea to not make the differences too large. The main way of generating distinctiveness between colors is through their hues. The smallest slices on the left not only repeat colors in the palette, they are also fairly difficult to distinguish from one another. Looping through colors multiple times is a bad idea, as this can cause confusion.
If you have more possible values than colors, then you should try to bundle values together, like setting the smallest categories to a single “other” category. With more colors than this, you start to run into trouble distinguishing between groups. As a rule of thumb, you should try to limit the maximum palette size to ten or fewer colors. In a qualitative palette, the colors assigned to each group need to be distinct. Each possible value of the variable is assigned one color from a qualitative palette.
Examples include country or state, race, and gender. Categorical variables are those that take on distinct labels without inherent ordering. Qualitative paletteĪ qualitative palette is used when the variable is categorical in nature. The type of color palette that you use in a visualization depends on the nature of the data mapped to color. Three major types of color palette exist for data visualization: In this article, we will describe the types of color palette that are used in data visualization, provide some general tips and best practices when working with color, and highlight a few tools to generate and test color palettes for your own chart creation. A good set of colors will highlight the story you want the data to tell, while a poor one will hide or distract from a visualization’s purpose. (This article was originally published on Nightingale, journal of the Data Visualization Society.)Ĭhoice of color is a major factor in creating effective charts.
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