Practical Tableau

Chapter 55. Leveraging Color to Improve Your Data Visualization

The use of color can help a story in your data pop off the page. Color can add a level of professionalism to any project and can even elicit specific emotions in viewers. The use of color is one of the easiest ways to take your data visualization from good to great—so why do we see so many blue, orange, and green lines out there? Maybe it’s that creative design is thought of as unnecessary in a corporate setting. Maybe visualization designers don’t realize just how easy it is to set your dashboards apart by introducing some custom color. True, Tableau worked hard to provide standard color options that work very well together, but maybe you need to align your data visualization with your corporate identity or are just looking for a way to help your work stand out. To help you leverage color to improve your data visualization, this chapter shares an introduction to color theory and points you to a tutorial for loading custom color palettes into your own version of Tableau so you can use them every day.

The Color Wheel: Where It All Begins

The color wheel is based off of the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue, with secondary and tertiary colors between each of the three primary colors. This allows a designer to visualize the balance and harmony of colors when they are side by side. The colors on the outside ring of the color wheel shown here are at full saturation, meaning there is no black or white added. These ...