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What happens when finding the right color for data viz fails?

Incremental Improvements #17: Intuitive color-coding

Published in
4 min readSep 13, 2021

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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.

Original DataViz by Brian Moore @ Tableau Public

Tableau dashboard on energy consumption by country.
Original Dashboard @ Tableau Public

Good data visualization solutions✔️

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Counter Arts
Counter Arts

Published in Counter Arts

The (Counter)Cultural One-Stop for Nonfiction on Medium… incorporating categories for: ‘Art’, ‘Culture’, ‘Equality’, ‘Photography’, ‘Film’, ‘Mental Health’, ‘Music’ and ‘Literature’.

Weronika Gawarska-Tywonek
Weronika Gawarska-Tywonek

Written by Weronika Gawarska-Tywonek

Data Visualization Designer | Trainer | Sociologist. Check my redesigned charts in weekly Incremental Improvements articles.

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