Define your Dashboard Colour Palette First
There are many articles about the psychology of colour and you may have seen or heard someone mention the Colour Wheel. Eleanor McKenna has written a great article about this topic and I’ve provided a link at the bottom of the article. There’s emotion behind each colour such as red signalling danger and aggression and blues signalling harmony and relaxation.
In this article, I will be discussing colour in relation to dashboard design and why it’s important to first to establish a palette to use.
Which colours should I use?
You will often be building a dashboard or report for a particular brand and those at the company will 99% of the time insist on using their Brand Guidelines. I’ve seen some guidelines which provide basic guidance around colour with the 3 or 4 main colours and others which are more comprehensive and break down into scale colours.
Some brand colours work better than others when visualising digitally or on a printed page. A dashboard is more about information rather than making something look good for the sake of it or for marketing purposes, so you must understand and reflect the brand but ultimately make the dashboard a source of clear information.
Take for example Coca-Cola who use a strong red as their main colour. Building a dashboard with this strong red and white wouldn’t work as you only want to use red in certain situations and on a dashboard usually highlights where there’s an issue. You can use scale colours but scaling reds doesn’t always work so well. If you need to use red then think about a very soft pastel colour.
Defining Primary Colours
You will be surprised how many colours you need when building a dashboard. Firstly you will need to define a few standard colours that reflect the brand. Start with around 3 to 5 Primary colours.
Scale Colours
You will need to use colours that vary in lightness and darkness. If we take the strong blue above for example, we could use a pale shade of blue text against this colour as a background and vice-versa. It’s a good idea to have an odd number of scale colours. I personally will look at a percentage scale on this primary colour but then use my eyes to determine the best result.
When it comes to greys, you will need to define a similar scale pallet first.
Summary
Whichever colours you use whether that’s your own or colours of a brand, choose carefully and give yourself enough to work with — you’ll need more than you think!
