Corporate brand colours in Tableau
A great feature of Tableau is the ability to customise, play, hack…there are a millions ways to do things. Adding a custom colour palette is just one example of this. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the knowledge base article on the Tableau website.
This is great for Tableau desktop users who want to get a bit more creative and don’t want to have to add colours in every time they use the product. Another popular use case is for corporate users. Brand colours and guidelines involve very specific set of design principles. Font types and a set colour palette are the main areas of control. I’m sure there are plenty more. I’m not a designer so please forgive my ignorance.
This isn’t so much of a tip, but more something to think about. We use a custom colour palette at my company. Its bright, bold and very colourful. Sometimes it is difficult to use across dimensions in a chart for fear of looking like a bag of skittles. You will see from the images below.
Lots of my Tableau desktop users add a custom colour palette as defined by our design team. They take the hex codes or RGB numbers from the design guide and follow my instructions to add these to the Tableau Preferences.tps file (see knowledge base article link above).
For years my users have been adding these colours based on the sequence they appear in the design guide. This is where I believe the use of colour in design differs from that in data visualisation. The design guide lists the hex codes based on sequential and then diverging colours. Different shades of the same colours.
This gives us a list of the corporate brand colours, but in case you haven’t noticed, colours which are similar are grouped together. Red and pink, then greens, blues and oranges.
The implication for this is when the hex codes are entered into the preferences.tps file it is how they will appear in Tableau desktop.
Some people may not be bothered by this, but when used in a bar chart it can put two similar colours next to each other. At a glance users may not realise this and think that the items are similar or related when they are actually distinct. The Tableau user would then have to edit colours and change the colour from the other options from the branded colour palette.
So to make this more efficient, the trick is to set up the hex codes in the tps file in the sequence you want them to appear.
By changing the order of the hex codes I could assign colours that are distinct from each other. Tableau will now use the first colours (red, green, yellow and blue) for my bar chart.
I’m using the same colours from my custom palette, but I changed the hex code sequence and now the default assign creates a more distinct colour for the dimensions.
Not everyone will have this problem, but I had feedback from my user base and we solved the issue. We can still use our corporate colour palette, we just had to pay a bit more attention to the order of the hex codes.
I hope this helps.
