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

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.

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

• 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.
• If you want objects in a table or graph to be easily seen, use a background color that contrasts sufficiently with the object.
• Use color only when needed to serve a particular communication goal.
• 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.