Natural Color Schemes

Samantha Zhang, the graphics lead at GraphiqHQ, writes about choosing the right color palette.

Zhang remarks that choosing a color palette to best represent data in a visualization can be more difficult than it might first seem. A graphic designer must give extra thought even when working from existing color palettes,  because they may have been created to serve a purpose other than that the designer is trying to serve.

For instance, the below color palette is visually appealing:



It represents ten hues in two shades each. The shades are all close, and the hues are spaced far apart. This color palette works really well for user interface design. To represent data, it doesn't work as well. To effectively represent numerical data, we should use a gradient of a single hue. For example:



Some hues will work better than others. The human eye is better at differentiating subtle shades of certain colors than others. For example, for the vast majority of people, it is easier to pick up on slightly different shades of blue than shades of yellow. For this reason, a graphic designer would be unwise to choose to represent data by a yellow gradient.