from A detailed guide to colours in data visualisation style guides
How to include brand colours?
Branded colours are not necessarily going to work on data visualisation
“High brand recognition” - People are more likely to associate your charts with your organisation when they use its logo colours. ‘Memorable’
Highlight from this part of the article
- Only using brand colours for certain categories + Use less saturated colours in different hues for other charts
- Only using brand colours for visualisations with one category
- eg for a bar chart that shows one category
- Only using brand colours for the most important category. If multiple categories are same important use other colours.
- Only using similar colours to the brand colours, eg McKincy’s Blue
- Adjust brand colours for data visualisation if it is too bright or too saturated
- Using colours that have a similar vibe(look) to brand colours
- eg Bloomberg = very bright, Mailchimp = retro
So in summary of the question “How to use brand colours?” is
- Use brand colours with important data
- Adjust brand colours for data visualisation
How many colours too choose?
The more colours you define in a data vis style guide palette, the more flexible chart creators can be without your help**. **But the bigger the colour palette, the more you need to train coworkers to use it well.
London Style guide ‘prepare for everything = flexible palette’
Dancing around the colour wheel
- use different hues for palette; extend brand colours
That homogenous palette works because the visualisation types are all very different from each other. The variety does not come from the colours, but from the shapes.
Colour order and combination
A design system should still be simple enough that people want to use it
Colours for big and small areas
etc
- Sentiment that colours convey
- Attention grabbing
- Medium: print vs digital
- opacity
- background colour
- dark mode