I underestimated colour schemes in chart visualisations until I delved deeper into how they work. The moment I understood how they work, I can confidently say that the visualisation affects improved drastically. Knowing how colour schemes work is no rocket science. There is a set of colour combinations which work wonders together and I will be demonstrating these in this article today. Choosing the best complimentary colours is not difficult ones you have a grasp of the different schemes below.

The diagram below depicts the full colour scheme that one could use. This is known as the colour wheel.

Monochrome

This is the simplest of the schemes. Once a colour is chose (I chose Yellow Orange) in the image below, we can differentiate our categories by selecting a lighter or darker shade.

Application: This is a great choice when you wish that everyone should understand your chart, especially those colour-impaired.

Analogous

In this scheme, one has to select two colours that fall on either side of the wheel. One drawback of such combination, is the fact that the colours seem to be close to each other, therefore could be difficult for some people to distinguish.

Application: Gradient charts and heat maps

Complementary

In this colour combination, we use opposite facing colours from the wheel. For example, yellow orange and blue violet, green and red, yellow and violet and so on. Such combination is very helpful when we need to clearly distinguish between categories. This would be very easy on the eye.

Application: Best used in clustered charts, bar charts and line charts

Split Complementary

This is similar to the previous Complementary approach, with the main difference, that instead of using the exact opposite colour, we use the colours on either side of the opposite colour. For example we use blue and violet, with the yellow orange colour.

Application: This is particularly useful when we have 3 categories, but we wish to focus on one of them in specifically to focus for example on a trend.

Triadic

This colour combination is based on an equilateral triangle

Application: This colour combination is chosen when we want to give equal importance to all our categories. In this case our eyes will focus on the three categories at the same time.

Tetradic

From its name, in a tetradic scheme we choose a colour combination where the colours fall inside a rectangular shape as shown in the image.

Application: This colour combination is particularly useful when we have multiple categories and we wish to give them equal importance. We use a triadic scheme for odd numbers while a tetradic scheme for even numbers.