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What happens when finding the right color for data viz fails?
Incremental Improvements #17: Intuitive color-coding
Color is a very powerful element of any data visualization. It can set the tone, guide attention or help understand the message. But what happens if we use it wrong? Our message gets distorted, becomes less impactful and difficult to process. In this makeover let’s focus on the last case.
I found an engaging and insightful dashboard focusing on energy consumption across the world created by Brian Moore. At a first glance, it gives a nice overview and thanks to well-thought-of interactions encourages further analysis. It reaches the sweet spot of being minimalistic and insightful. The only thing that distorts the perception is color usage. Theoretically, with nominal scale every categorical palette should work well, right? Not necessarily. We should not only keep in mind the pallet type but also, if possible, chose color that matches the mental representation.