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Use Color Meaningfully
Start with Choosing the Proper Palette
What are the palette types, and how to choose the right one?
Color is a powerful tool when visualizing data but used excessively or incorrectly, it will ruin your work and cause confusion in your audience. Therefore, we should make color choices thoughtfully and keep in mind how human perception works.
In this article, I’ll focus on palette types and how to select the right one.
Different palette types
We have three types of palettes — categorical (also known as qualitative), sequential, and diverging.
In this classification, colors aren’t the determining aspect, and different palette types can share some colors. What defines each palette is the relation between those colors. In the categorical palette, colors should be primarily well distinguishable from one another, and they should not suggest any order. On the other hand, in the sequential and diverging palettes, we should order colors — either based on brightness, luminance, or saturation*.
*If those terms are new to you, check this brilliant and accessible introduction to color theory [1].
