Choosing colors is not only fun but crucial to pulling off an excellent visualization. Choosing the wrong colors can lead to a visualization that is illegible to those with different abilities or might be misleading to the viewer. For more information on choosing colors, check out the article below. For some great tools to help you choose the perfect color schema, explore the tabs in this box.
Designed specifically for people working with maps, ColorBrewer 2.0 gives plenty of helpful information on choosing colors, such as which one look the best for print visualizations, how color blind folks will see your visualization, and how many "classes" are effective for your data set.
Created by Cynthia Brewer and Mark Harrower from The Pennsylvania State University using Open code, this is one of our favorite color picking tools.
Built as a way to visualize the chroma.js library, Colorpicker for data is a fun way to explore color. While this tool is probably better for someone who has a firm grasp of color theory, it's a wonderful place to find colors if you have more time to spend browsing. It also gives you the option to see what your chosen colors would look like on a map.
Data Color Picker is an amazing tool that lets you start with two colors and fills in the rest for you. It also shows plenty of examples of how your colors would look in a visualization, allows you to see those colors on a light and dark background, and gives you plenty of information on why you might want to choose those colors (or different colors!). Another favorite tool!
Picular pitches itself as the "Google of color", which is fairly accurate. When you type any word into their search bar, they will return a whole suite of colors that they've identified as "matching" your search term. It's a ton of fun to play around with and can really help get your creativity flowing!
