Understanding Color Palette

Understanding a color palette involves understanding how colors are chosen and mixed to produce a consistent and visually attractive scheme for a variety of purposes, including design, art, fashion, and branding. The main elements of a color palette:

  • Primary colors: In classical color theory, the basic colors are RGB( red, blue, and yellow,) which may be blended to produce new hues used in digital design, including screens and displays.
  • Secondary colors: Primary colors are mixed together to create this. For example, blending blue and yellow results in green.
  • Tertiary Colors: Blue-green and red-orange are examples of main and secondary color combinations.
  • Neutral colors: Include black, white, greys, and sometimes browns and beiges. These colors may be used to tone down a palette or as a backdrop for more intense colors.

How to select Colors for Data Visualizations?

Data visualization is one of the crucial steps in machine learning which therefore helps the analyst to explain the process of visualizing the data in an interactive and efficient way.

We have a variety of data visualization approaches in machine learning which includes line charts, bar charts, heat maps, box plots etc. but deciding on which color to choose for conveying better visualization is need to be considered.

In this article, let’s understand the requirement of colors for correct data visualization.

Table of Content

  • Understanding Color Palette
  • Components and Properties of Colors
  • How are Colors related to Temperature?
  • Types of Color Palettes
    • 1. Qualitative Color Palette
    • 2. Sequential Color Palette
    • 3. Diverging Color Pallette
    • Popular Color Palettes
  • Selecting Primary Color
  • Color Palettes for Comparing Objects
    • 1. Pallettes Used to Compare Two Objects
    • 2. Palettes Used to Compare Three Objects
    • 3. Palettes Used to Compare Four Objects
  • Color Palettes for Quantitative Data
  • Advantages of Color Theory – Selecting Right Color for Visualization
  • Importance of Background Colors
  • Best Practices for Selecting Right Color

Similar Reads

Understanding Color Palette

Understanding a color palette involves understanding how colors are chosen and mixed to produce a consistent and visually attractive scheme for a variety of purposes, including design, art, fashion, and branding. The main elements of a color palette:...

Components and Properties of Colors

Colors contain a variety of components and qualities that determine how they seem and interact with one another. Understanding these components and qualities is critical for developing successful color palettes and designs....

How are Colors related to Temperature?

Temperature can be defined as a presentation of color instead of saying it as a property. Colors are often correlated with temperature in ways related to the psychological and emotional reactions they elicit, as well as their location on the color spectrum. This is further divided into two types: ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ ones....

Types of Color Palettes

There are three different types of color palette and it all depends upon the role of colors....

Selecting Primary Color

After creating the palette, it’s time to choose a key color. This key color can be of various types, like primary brand color, usage of the same color that was used in the previous presentation. The main aim of this key color is to depict data points in the presentation to catch the attention of the audience. It is used to illustrate the relationship between the data points and the rest of the data and the count of colors we are going to use....

Color Palettes for Comparing Objects

1. Pallettes Used to Compare Two Objects...

Color Palettes for Quantitative Data

It’s observed that to show quantitative data with its specific colors, it should maintain its harmony with changes in saturation or lightness levels. The two types of color harmony are:...

Advantages of Color Theory – Selecting Right Color for Visualization

Convey Emotions: Emotions are directly connected with colors. Different color symbolize different emotions whether it is sad, happy, optimistic, afraid, anxious or urgency. Generally, darker colors like red, orange are used by analysts for showing negative emotions and lighter colors like yellow, light blue used for showing positive emotions in their analysis. Accessible for all: This is one of the most demanding benefit of color theory. Everyone around the world can use this feature to improve their presentations. This will also help people to connect with each other across the nation. Providing Clarity: Clarity is one of the major factor to enhance your presentations. To make a content readable, analysts have to use visuals like slides ,bars with different colors to communicate their ideas with the users. Apart from this , the content should be precise, well structured and relevant to the topic. Consistency: Color theory acts as a crucial part for branding as well as for data representations. The consistency in color will increase the brand recognition, professionalism and trust among all the viewers for that particular brand....

Importance of Background Colors

Before the selection of background color, analysts should maintain the contrast and clarity of the data in the content. To make it readable, one should use appropriate colors for presenting their data more effectively. Like, we can use light blue color for inducing calmness, dark gray for sophistication. Not only it will support brand identification, but also it will convey specific emotions for the data to be used....

Best Practices for Selecting Right Color

Resist Overuse: It’s always preferred to use neutral colors like gray color for charts and mention the data points on them with some bold colors. To use two or three colors is much more suited as compared to the usage of multicolor in your presentation, which will help users to avoid confusions. Correct Color Scheme according to dataset: Before selecting the color palette, always see the type of dataset and then prefer your palette according to it. We have three types of color palette which includes sequential, categorical and diverging for different patterns of data since every data and its color has the own significance. Observe Color Conventions: Around the world, colors has their own importance with different meaning. For example, in some places ‘red’ is used for danger while in some places it’s used for excitement and love. From this , we can say that one color has different meanings. Avoid Color Blindness: We should always observe whether the user has any color blindness or not. According to that we should use color to make it easy to read for them also. Like, if a person has red-green blindness, so we should use some different combination of color for their convenience. Black and White: We should always visualize our data firstly in black and white color and then should try for other color techniques. It comes into action when the deadline of presentation is near and we are not happy with our color technique, then at least we can submit black and white as an usable version....

Conclusion

Under this topic, we have covered about what is color palette, its usage, benefits, selecting key color, how color is related to temperature, palettes for showing quantitative data, palettes used for comparison of two to four objects and importance of palette in data visualization. We have chose colors in such a way that they have high clarity in visibility and made accessible for all viewers. Apart from this, we have seen the usage of libraries such as seaborn, matplotlib to select and create color palettes for visualization and also the background colors used for analysis. Therefore, these palettes are used by analysts for the visual representation of data....