Diverging Color Palette Archives - Depict Data Studio

How to Apply Your Brand Colors in Dataviz (Ordinal, Diverging, Categorical, and More)

Ann K. Emery — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 15:08:00 +0000

Colors can make or break a chart.

Colors direct our eye movements, and therefore our brains and attention.

It’s up to you: will you help or hinder your reader’s understanding?

Step 1: Start with Your Brand Colors

Otherwise, your graphs, slides, and dashboards will be Frankensteined.

I’ve written about brand colors and brand presents in other posts.

Some of those resources include:

Examples of organizations’ brand colors used in graphs

How to read color codes in style guides

How to enter your custom color codes in Excel

Step 2: Do Your Accessibility Testing

I’ve written about colorblindness, color contrast, grayscale printing in other posts.

Some of those resources include:

Then, your accessibility testing “results” should go inside your organization’s Dataviz Style Guide.

Step 3: Apply Those Brand Colors According to the Data & Variables

Now, it’s time to apply those branding colors to ensure that your graph is intuitive.

Look at your graph: Is your variable binary, sequential, diverging, or categorical?

Or, do you want to tell a story with a dark-light contrast?

Binary Variables Get Binary Color Schemes

Binary variables include yes/no data, such as:

yes/no survey questions
people who speak Portuguese as their primary language vs. people who don’t
people who own a home vs. people who don’t
people who graduated from program on time vs. people who didn’t
people diagnosed with an illness vs. people who don’t have it

For binary variables, choose one brand color. The “presence” of the attribute gets the darker color, and the “absence” of the attribute gets the lighter color.

Here’s an example:

Sequential Variables Get Sequential Color Schemes

a.k.a. ordinal

Sequential variables have a natural order.

Examples include:

age ranges (5-9 year olds, 10-14 year olds, and 15-19 year olds)
income levels
highest educational level completed (some high school, high school diploma, some college, etc.)
years (Year 1, Year 2, and Year 3 of a project)
semesters (fall, spring, fall, spring…)
cohorts (first cohort of participants, second cohort, etc.)

For sequential variables, choose one brand color, and use a light-dark gradation of that color.

Here’s an example:

Categorical Variables Get Categorical Color Schemes

a.k.a. nominal

Categorical variables include:

race/ethnicity (African American, Asian, Hispanic/Latin@, White, etc.)
gender (male, female, nonbinary, genderfluid, etc.)
chapters of a report
sections of a presentation
categories of a dashboard

For categorical variables, use a different brand color for each category.

Here’s an example:

Diverging Variables Get Diverging Color Schemes

Diverging variables are opposites.

Examples include:

agree/disagree scales on surveys
changes over time (e.g., “50 percent decrease” or “70 percent increase”)

For diverging variables, choose two brand colors, and place the darkest shades on the poles.

Here’s an example:

Combining these Techniques

In most real-life projects, we need to combine these color techniques.

In this map makeover, for example, we needed to:

use brand colors, not software defaults;
use two brand colors, one for each category; and
apply a dark-light gradation to each map, because these are ordinal variables.

In this population pyramid makeover, we needed to:

use two brand colors, one for each timeframe, and
apply a dark-light storytelling emphasis to each pyramid.

Your Turn

What types of color questions do you have? Comment below..

The post How to Apply Your Brand Colors in Dataviz (Ordinal, Diverging, Categorical, and More) appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

How to Visualize Survey Data with Crowded Agree-Disagree Scales

Ann K. Emery — Tue, 23 May 2017 15:08:00 +0000

There’s more than one way to visualize those agree-disagree survey scales. Today, let’s look at seven of your choices.

Survey Results

Last month I spoke to Harvard University graduate students about visualizing survey results. I made up some fake numbers to accompany their real survey questions.

Stacked Bar Chart with Diverging Color Palette

Option A is a stacked bar chart. I chose horizontal bars over vertical bars because I arrange ordinal variables from left to right across the page. I also chose to display numbers of people instead of percentages. I use numbers when we’ve got fewer than 100 responses and I convert those numbers into percentages when we’ve got more than 100 responses. Agree/disagree survey scales are diverging variables so we need a diverging color palette. I selected two hues (blue and magenta). The most saturated version of each color goes on the outer poles. The only problem with this traditional approach is that the graph is a bit crowded. Where are the viewers supposed to look? What’s most important? When everything all at once is competing for attention, it’s easy to lose viewers.

Draw Attention to Strongly Agree or Strongly Disagree

Option B draws attention to the strongly agree responses. This is a good option for personalities who like to see the world through rose-colored glasses.

Option C draws attention to strongly disagree responses. This is a good option for internal audiences or for audiences with whom you’ve already built some trust and rapport. Very few viewers have an appetite for bad news.

I often use a combination of these two styles when presenting slideshows to live audiences. On the first slide, I show the good news. A few moments later, I show the bad news on the next slide. Then, we pause and discuss what might’ve led to these results.

Collapse the Categories

Option D combines the strongly agree and agree responses and the disagree and strongly disagree responses. This approach can declutter a crowded graph; focus viewers on big-picture patterns; whet their appetite for additional details when they’ve got time to spare; or satisfy their appetite for just a bit of information if they’re in a hurry.

Diverging Stacked Bar Chart

Option E is a diverging stacked bar chart in which the agrees slide over to the left and the disagrees slide over to the right.
Option F draws our attention to the poles.

Square Pies

Finally, I built four square pies that draw attention to the strongly agree and agree responses. Square pies are a good option for small n‘s because each shape subtly reminds us that we’re talking about a small group of real human beings. You could take this concept a step further with illustrated icons instead of squares. But good luck finding an icon to represent feeling connected to a museum or having your voice valued…

Bonus: Download the Materials

Purchase the templates

The post How to Visualize Survey Data with Crowded Agree-Disagree Scales appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

Which Colors Should I Use in My Charts? Start with Brand Colors

Ann K. Emery — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 15:08:08 +0000

I’ve got a lot of dataviz skeletons in my closet. This beauty comes from my second week as an evaluator:

Border, grid lines, tick marks…. A legend instead of direct labeling… A generic title instead of a “so what?” title… You get the idea.

Today I want to focus on intentional color schemes. The client’s logo was blue and green. Why’d we use those oranges? Because we’d been using Excel’s blues in other reports and wanted to try something new. Um, yeah. It was an honest effort. Somehow default oranges seemed better. That was the extent of intentionality in my charts.

Now that I know what I’m doing…

It’s no longer my second week in evaluation. Follow the Data Visualization Checklist and we’ll hang out in the now-we-know-better club together.
Here’s what Stephanie Evergreen and I laid out in the Checklist: Color scheme is intentional means that Color schemes should represent brand or other intentional choice, not default color schemes. A safe bet for consultants is to use your client’s colors.

How’d my original chart score? 0/2 points, no surprise there.

So not this:

But Ann do you have examples of color schemes done well? Great question.

You bet.

Matching the American Evaluation Association’s Logo

I recently made a video about AEA’s Data Visualization and Reporting topical interest group. The video debuts on www.aea365.org later this month. I want viewers to remember that I’m talking about a dataviz group within AEA. Crazy idea, I know I know. The video’s word cloud, circle chart, bar chart, and line chart matched AEA’s classic burgundy.