From the course: Data Visualization for Marketers

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Using color

Using color

From the course: Data Visualization for Marketers

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Using color

- [Instructor] Color is one of the most abused elements of data visualization. We use color with the best of intentions, but we create monstrosities like this. Someone thought this was a good idea, and it does have good contrast. It just gives me a headache at the same time. Think about mental tasks again. Color like this demands more of my brain, in this case to stifle screams, leaving less brain power to think about the data. First, there's a bit of cleanup, and that starts with contrast. The only time to use a dark background is if your data visualization will be in a document that itself has a dark background. Otherwise, I don't need to see my data against the night sky. So, the first thing I'm going to do is change the background here to white. Yikes, now I can't read the text. So, I'm going to increase the contrast for the text, as well. Now that we fixed contrast, we can actually think about color. A little color is great, our brains do really well with natural color palettes…

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