Picking great colors for your visualizations can make the difference between a ho-hum or confusing visualization and one that really makes the point.
Today I've been experimenting with Calendar Heatmaps in Tessitura Analytics. Below are two color palettes on exactly the same data. The only difference is the color palette I've chosen to communicate the values.
The Colors palette on the two charts makes a big difference in the clarity of the communication.
On the left, I chose a pallet like this
This seemed to be a reasonable set of color in the Color picker. The colors for the highest values were warm red-orange colors at the top to Lowest at Bottom with dark blue colors.
However, the resulting heat map makes it hard to understand that most weekends we establish more new memberships more consistently. When I just change the colors to the palette to the below. I end up with the heatmap on the right. Same breakpoints. Just different colors. Here are the colors I've used.
Now we see a weekend pattern and an interesting set of weekdays where LSC get more new memberships. (Hint these busy days include, MLK Day, Presidents Day, and Spring Break Week.) These show up very clearly.
So picking good colors can be hard. There are lots of issues to consider. Here is a link to an article about picking good colors for your data visualizations
https://blog.graphiq.com/finding-the-right-color-palettes-for-data-visualizations-fcd4e707a283
There are lots of others out there.
For the calendar heat map on the right above, I ended up using ColorBrew2 to select my colors.
I then pasted the colors hex values into the color picker in Tessitura Analytics
And presto, a considerably more communicative calendar heatmap.
I would love to see other folks chart makeovers. What did it look like before you picked a great color palette? What does it look like now? How have the colors helped communicate the message more clearly?
--Tom
Interestingly this article was just floated our in the PASS insights newsletter
https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2019/9/3-storytelling-color-tips-improve-your-data-visualization
Heath Wilder
can you share the link to the PASS insights newsletter you got this from?
Looks like they are only up to July online archive https://www.pass.org/Community/Directories/Newsletters.aspx but I can forward you the email if you like
Heath
I’m part of PASS here in the states. There are 4 different insight news letters:
DBA focus
Analytics focus
bi focus
Developer focus
do you now which this appeared in?
All,
PASS the Professional Association of SQL Server is a great free resource.
This is a really interesting discussion on colors (Or colours as we call them over this side of the pond)
I'm struggling to get a nice clean clear color palette in Tessitura Analytics.
With the Tessitura default palette, it often brings in a black and other dark colors in charts and the label text is just not readable on the black.
I've tried the other pallets too, but they all end up with colors that are very similar as soon as a chart has more than 4 or 5 items.
I also find that the text is a grey shade that is difficult to read (especially when exported to PDF/Powerpoint) rather than a nice clear black text.
Has anyone else had problems like this and is there a nice easy solution? I don't really want to have to manually add hex colours on every dashboard I create.
thanks,
Hi Dara,
It is worth talking to your marketing department as it is likely that they have brand colours that they use in their communications. You will probably have to add hex colours but once you've used them a couple of times, Analytics remembers it and they'll be easy to add.
We have 4 brand colours and we use only those in our dashboards. We usually have 1 colour per widget which makes the dashboard look clean and easy to follow. It's a decision that has been received really well especially from senior staff.
Thanks,Thanos
I was actually just thinking about colors this morning as well after reading this article: http://www.storytellingwithdata.com/blog/2020/5/6/picking-the-right-colors. (Side note: Storytelling with Data is a great blog to follow.)
I've had a lot of those same questions. I also haven't been able to find one of the palettes that I particularly like or to get any changed colors in a widget to stick for use between dashboards. (Thanos, I'm curious if you did something to get Analytics to remember them.)
I've also wondered about modifying the label colors. It would be nice to choose even just between black or gray or white for the color scheme. However, depending on the size of the widget and screen, sometimes labels appear both inside and outside of the bars on the same chart, so that sometimes presents another challenge in choosing colors.
Thanks Christine. I'm making my way through the book but didn't know about the blog
There is some great but simple stuff in Good Charts by Scott Berinato, mainly about calming down with over colouring a chart