Colouring data visualizations
By: Cate Wilcox
Tags: Branding, Design, Data Visualization, Visual Design, UX

Semantic factors

This is how we interpret meaning from colour. The associations we have with colour depends on the cultural, environmental and personal contexts that we’ve been exposed to. These differences can be seen in “Colours in Culture” from Information is Beautiful (below). The colour green, for example, is associated with good luck in Arab, Japanese, and Western cultures — while in African, Chinese, and Eastern European cultures, good luck is associated with the colour red.

By being aware of these perceptual and semantic factors, you can select colour combinations that avoid common constraints and help focus attention on the message you want to share.

Questions to ask before picking colours

Let’s imagine that you’re a part owner in the Udderly Delicious Ice Cream Company, a small fleet of ice cream carts in Ottawa, Canada. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself when picking colours for data visualizations.

Who’s the audience?

Are you making visualizations for a specific group of people? Are there cultural or industry-specific conventions they use for colour?

Let’s say you thought it would be helpful to put together a few visualizations to share with your business partners to help inform budget, sales targets, and other areas to focus on this year.

You know that, when it comes to cultural or industry-specific conventions in Canada, green means good and red means bad. You’ve also seen blue and red used together when referencing temperature.

By taking a few moments to write down what you know about your audience, their goals & motivations, your story becomes clearer.

What’s the story?

Ok, now that we know who the audience is, it’s important to focus on the story we want to tell before thinking about colour. What are you trying to explain to your audience? For example, at the Udderly Delicious Ice Cream Company, what are the three most important questions that you and your business partners need answered to inform the business this year?



Maybe you’re wondering what the annual sales for the top 5 ice cream flavours are because it will affect what you choose to order for your first batch this year. Or maybe you’re wanting to see sales volume by neighbourhood, so that you can strategically distribute the ice cream carts to meet customer demands. Or perhaps you want to visualize customer satisfaction per cart to see if any trends become obvious.

By knowing the story and how it relates to your audience, you’ll know how to check if you’ve achieved what you set out to do. It means you know why sharing this information matters, what data you’ll be using — and often this will lead you to the best way to visualize this information.

When to use colour in data visualizations

Now that we know the audience and have figured out what information we want to share, we can focus on colouring the data.

It’s important to remember that colour needs a purpose. If the information can be understood without it, then don’t add colour. As a general rule, if the visualization only has two dimensions of data, like gross profit over the years, then you don’t even need a palette, a single colour is perfect.