How to Choose Colors for Your Data Visualizations

Color is a major factor in creating effective charts. A good set of colors will highlight the story you want the data to tell, while a poor one will hide or distract from a visualization’s purpose.

In this article, I’ll describe the types of color palette that are used in data visualization, provide some general tips and best practices when working with color, and highlight a few tools to generate and test color palettes for your own charts.

Types of color palette

Three major types of color palette exist for data visualization:

• Qualitative palettes
• Sequential palettes
• Diverging palettes

The type of color palette that you should use in a visualization depends on the nature of the data mapped to color.

Qualitative palette

A qualitative palette is used when the variable is categorical in nature. Categorical variables are those that take on distinct labels without inherent ordering. Examples include country or state, race, and gender. Each possible value of the variable is assigned one color from a qualitative palette.

In a qualitative palette, the colors assigned to each group need to be distinct. As a rule…