Green does not mean stop. People trust blue. Italian sports cars come in certain colours for good reason – to create emotional reactions and experience. Colours around the world, around you, all have meanings and importance. Getting them right in a Viz can make the difference between meh and wow, even out to whether your audience understands and sees the key insight you worked so hard to bring to life.
What does Blue mean to you? What do you think of? The wide open sky? Certain brands or products that captured blue in our imagination? Trust may come to mind, which could explain why so many banks have blue logos. What about robin egg blue?
Or #81D8D0 or R:129 G:216 B:208 . to be exact.
Tiffany’s come to mind as having captured that colour? Knowing and applying colour theory to your viz can grab attention better, and make you more aware in case you are targeting an audience of a different culture – you’ll learn more about them and their culture and you’ll know more about colours.
What if you viz’d and people couldn’t read it? What if you didn’t know that nearly 8% of men have some kind of colour blindness that changes the way they interpret colour? – It could even be you. Knowing that there is a small but non trivial group out there that can’t see some red/green combinations should make you skip those as your primary colours.
What if you wanted to stand out? Or have your own personal brand and style? Wouldn’t you want to include that in your viz , more than just a little logo at the bottom? Personalising the colours that works for you, or if you are making them for another person/company/entity, making it more fun, more yours and something to stand out from the default crowd.
Need to practice that a bit and working at a company? Be sure to always use the company or corporate colours in your work viz’s. It may sound a bit boring, but the corporate colours often have a lot of thought put into them, to contrast well, to accommodate the colour blind and to send the right message about the firm. Having your viz, which may be dashboard or copied into a powerpoint deck or blog, in the same colours as the rest makes you look that little more professional, that little more consistent and memorable for the right reason (insight) not the wrong one (jarring colour combination in materials that made people look away or reach for sunglasses).
So grab that colour, well the RGB or HEX value of your colour. Get a photo with the colours you think pop and you want to use. Come back soon for another blog on how to get the colours you want, from photos, complementary, contrasting or just triangulating. And take a moment to look at colours in your viz to give it a bit more meaning. It sets you ahead of the crowd, which is where you want to be.
ps – you rarely see the blue orange default colours on Tableau Public’s Viz of the day
Vizology 