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9 Rules for Using Color in Business Intelligence Dashboards

A truly effective business dashboard makes good use of color to display business intelligence in an easily understood manner. Color theory and the cognitive effects of color are subjects close to the hearts of visual artists, but seldom appreciated by BI practitioners. Many a time have a come across business dashboards, data charts and other quantitative output that has such poor use of color that the real message of the data is perverted.

No one has championed the cause of clear information graphic design more than Stephen Few, author of Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. His efforts in this area are unflagging and much appreciated. Kudos go to Stephen for his latest brilliance in an article entitled Practical Rules for Using Color in Charts. It’s the latest article in Stephen’s series of “>Visual Business Intelligence” newsletters.

The article serves as a primer for the use of color in visual depictions of business intelligence. It focuses on the basic rules that one must understand in order to enjoy the power that color can have to enhance the meaning and clarity of our work with visual business intelligence. We dashboard designers absolutely must read and understand this article.

Let’s take a quick sneak peek at a couple of the illustrations that Stephen uses in the article and then we’ll list out the 9 Rules for Using Color.

Here are 2 Excel chart examples of color use. I won’t reprint the context of these graphics here, so please visit the article for the brilliant analysis.

Use of Colors in an Excel Dashboard

Heatmap dashboard

Now let’s look at the 9 Rules of Using Colors:

  1. If you want different objects of the same color in a table or graph to look the same, make sure that the background—the color that surrounds them—is consistent.
  2. If you want objects in a table or graph to be easily seen, use a background color that contrasts sufficiently with the object.
  3. Use color only when needed to serve a particular communication goal.
  4. Use different colors only when they correspond to differences of meaning in the data.
  5. Use soft, natural colors to display most information and bright and/or dark colors to highlight information that requires greater attention.
  6. When using color to encode a sequential range of quantitative values, stick with a single hue (or a small set of closely related hues) and vary intensity from pale colors for low values to increasingly darker and brighter colors for high values.
  7. Non-data components of tables and graphs should be displayed just visibly enough to perform their role, but no more so, for excessive salience could cause them to distract attention from the data.
  8. To guarantee that most people who are colorblind can distinguish groups of data that are color coded, avoid using a combination of red and green in the same display.
  9. Avoid using visual effects in graphs.

Tags: Color Theory, Business Graphics, Visual Design of Information Graphics, Dashboard Design

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Last Modified: Thursday, February 21st, 2008 @ 16:29

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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