Skip to Content
The Harvard Business Review Good Charts Collection
book

The Harvard Business Review Good Charts Collection

by Scott Berinato
January 2019
Beginner to intermediate
488 pages
13h 49m
English
Harvard Business Review Press
Content preview from The Harvard Business Review Good Charts Collection

Chapter 1

Controlling Color

“Some colors reconcile themselves to one another. Others just clash.” —Edvard Munch

Berinato_Workbook_Chapter01-fig01_jpg

If you have time to focus on improving only one thing in your charts, go after color. Most software can’t intuit a good use of color for your context. It can’t know how you want to group variables—which are primary and which are secondary, which are complementary and which are contrasting. Thus software tends to give every variable its own, somewhat randomly assigned color. Taken to an illogical extreme, your first output may be a mess of a rainbow like the above chart.

That’s no good. Our eyes’ ability to differentiate and remember ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Harvard Business Review Leadership Library: The Executive Collection (12 Books)

Harvard Business Review Leadership Library: The Executive Collection (12 Books)

Harvard Business Review, Michael D. Watkins, Clayton M. Christensen, Kenneth L. Kraemer, Michael E. Porter
Strategic Analytics: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

Strategic Analytics: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review, Eric Siegel, Edward L. Glaeser, Cassie Kozyrkov, Thomas H. Davenport
The Year in Tech, 2023: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

The Year in Tech, 2023: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review, Beena Ammanath, Andrew Ng, Michael Luca, Bhaskar Ghosh
Harvard Business Review Guides Ultimate Boxed Set (16 Books)

Harvard Business Review Guides Ultimate Boxed Set (16 Books)

Harvard Business Review, Nancy Duarte, Bryan A. Garner, Mary Shapiro, Jeff Weiss

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781633697300