Dashboard Zone

Here is a very insightful article on the use of colors in Charts by Stephen Few. If you are a dashboard designer or developer then this is a must read. If your boss or manager for whom you develop dashbaords,reports or charts likes eye-candy stuff then please make him/her aware of the following rules. Here is a quick summary of the rules that should be followed while designing and creating your dashboard

• 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.
  • avoid using gradients of color in the background or varying the background color in any other way.
• If you want objects in a table or graph to be easily seen, use a background color that contrasts sufficiently with the object.
  • choose colors carefully, always making sure that they are easy to see and that they effectively serve the purpose for which we are using them.
  • Please avoid the use of pure primary colors, they are tough on the eyes. Use their lighter or darker shades
• Use color only when needed to serve a particular communication goal.
  • Don’t use color to decorate the display. Dressing up a graph might serve a purpose in advertising, but it only distracts people from what’s important—the data—in an information display.
  • Eye-candy is OK for selling but not for consumption.
• Use different colors only when they correspond to differences of meaning in the data.
• Use soft, natural colors to display most information and bright and/or dark colors to highlight information that requires greater attention.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Avoid using visual effects in graphs.

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