Hello everyone! Welcome to part four of the dashboard design series. So far we already discussed the advantages of applying whitespace, proper text use and chart choice in your dashboards. Moving on, this blog post will be about colors in your dashboards, which is also an integral part of the best practices with respect to dashboard design.
Why? We humans are highly perceptive to colors. We associate colors like red with danger or negative outcomes while colors like green are associated with nature, profit and generally positive things. Hence, you can use color to draw the attention of the user to the key insights and let them understand the messages of the dashboard quicker. However, it is important to stay consistent with color usage. Remember, you do want to support the understanding of the dashboard and not confuse the user.
How? By now we solidified why we bother about the color on our dashboards. But how many colors and which colors should you use? As a rule of thumb your color palette should consist of around five different colors:
· Neutral color like grey for non-highlighted data points
· A color for positive insights
· A color for negative insights
· A highlight color
· A second highlight color
Color palette examples:
Be careful which color you chose for each part of the color palette. For instance, it is rather uncommon to see red used for positive insights. And instead of grey as main color you can use a low opacity version of a corporate color. Also the highlight colors should clearly deviate from the positive and negative colors. Remember the mantra: do not confuse the dashboard user! Moreover, you can turn down the opacity if the corporate colors are too bright and unpleasant to look at. Last but not least, you should use color sparsely. If in doubt stay with the neutral color.
That is it again for this little excerpt of color theory which of course cannot be fully covered in this blog post. Nevertheless, you should have an idea how to approach your own color palette and when to apply which color in your charts by now. Practice makes perfect (or close to). Happy vizzing!
Cheers, Tobias