- Color Theory
- Color Palettes
- Color and Emotion
Are you looking for some colors to use on your charts and graphs? Are you looking for some colors that are “easy” on the eyes? I don’t want to use the standard colors on my charts because they tend to look too intense, almost child-like. You also want to choose colors that work well together. And thirdly, you want to take into consideration those that are color blind, or have difficulty distinguishing certain colors, particularly red and green. They can look like shades of brown.
Color Names
Here’s an article by w3schools.com called HTML Color Names.
Stephen Few
Stephen Few suggests a list of 9 colors (Gray, Blue, Orange, Green, Pink, Brown, Purple, Yellow, Red) that work well together. They are shown in the table after the first three colors of red, green and blue. These 9 colors can be separated into meaningful color palettes using the various hues. Light and medium hues for conventional use and bright hues for highlighting. The following table shows Stephen’s Light colors, after the first three colors.
| Color | Hex Code | R | G | B |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Red | #FF0000 | 255 | 0 | 0 |
| Green | #00FF00 | 0 | 255 | 0 |
| Blue | #0000FF | 0 | 0 | 255 |
| grey | #8C8C8C | 140 | 140 | 140 |
| blue | #88BDE6 | 136 | 189 | 230 |
| orange | #FBB258 | 251 | 178 | 88 |
| green | #90CD97 | 144 | 205 | 151 |
| pink | #F6AAC9 | 246 | 170 | 201 |
| brown | #BFA554 | 191 | 165 | 84 |
| purple | #BC99C7 | 188 | 153 | 199 |
| yellow | #EDDD46 | 237 | 221 | 70 |
| red | #F07E6E | 240 | 126 | 110 |
Python
If you are programming in Python and you want to use some of Stephen Few’s Light colors, you could create variables for that. SFL stands for Stephen Few Light.
SFLgrey = '#8C8C8C'; SFLblue = '#88BDE6'; SFLorange = '#FBB258'; SFLgreen = '#90CD97'; SFLpink = '#F6AAC9' SFLbrown = '#BFA554'; SFLpurple = '#BC99C7'; SFLyellow = '#EDDD46'; SFLred = '#F07E6E'
Below is a seven-color palette that has the light colors above in this order: red, pink, orange, brown, yellow, green and blue.
color = ['#F07E6E', '#F6AAC9', '#FBB258', '#BFA554', '#EDDD46', '#90CD97', '#88BDE6']
color = ['', '', '', '', '', '']
The Right Colors
Here is an article called The Right Colors Make Data Easier To Read from the Harvard Business Review. They say “When colors are paired with the concepts that evoke them, we call these ‘semantically resonant color choices.'” If you are charting fruit sales, you might want to use yellow for bananas and purple for grapes. Semantically resonant colors may help improve graph-reading performance, provided that they are not too many intense colors to look at.
Culture
Colors have different meaning indifferent cultures. The previous link takes you to https://informationisbeautiful.net.
More Information
There’s lots of information on the web regarding color palettes. Try GoVisually. There are many many other websites that discuss color. For some popular color palettes you could go to Color Hunt.