Colors play a central role in data visualization, which can significantly affect the creation of effective charts. 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.
Last year, we received feedback on the chart colors from our customers, which drove the new improvement on our default color palettes recently.
Problems with our old color palettes
- They were not colorblind-friendly enough;
- The categorical palettes had low saturation, high lightness and didn’t satisfy the WCAG 2.1 web standard, which could significantly affect how viewers read a chart;
- They were outdated in the context of the current digital landscape.
New Update: More accessible and modern colors
In the upcoming February 2022 Product Update, we will introduce 7 new color palettes to address the accessibility and aesthetic issues mentioned above:
1. Categorical (or Quantitative) Color Palettes
A quantitative palette is mainly used to distinguish discrete items or groups that do not have an intrinsic order. Each possible value of the variable is assigned one color from a qualitative palette.
For example, here we built a donut chart to present the revenue distribution by country:
2. Sequential Color Palettes
Differently, a sequential palette is mostly used for ordered values (or numbers that go from low to high, and vice versa), such as income, temperature, or speed.
Below you will find a chart representing total orders placed by age group in each country:
3. Diverging Color Palettes
Being a combination of two sequential palettes with a shared endpoint sitting at the central value, a diverging palette is used when we have quantitative data with two extremes that share a midpoint (i.e: -2, -1, 0, 1, 2).
How to find/use the new color palettes
You can both find the new palettes in the Chart Color Setting (of an individual chart) and the Color Palettes Setting (of the whole account)
For more information, please visit our public doc here: Themes and Colors | Holistics Docs
Notes
For Holistics accounts created from 22 Feb 2022, these new color palettes will be the default colors. We have already deprecated our old palettes for these accounts.
If you are our customers before that day, you can find the new colors below our old color palettes. However, please note that will officially and totally replace the old color palettes with the new ones in May 2022.