Charts & Color

Join tcplot for a morning about color in charts, in two acts, in the grayest month of the Minnesota year.

Act one: bring a chart. Your ticket in is one chart and two minutes on its color: a palette you love, a heatmap that finally made something click, a transit map you could navigate with your eyes half shut, or a rainbow colormap you love to hate. By the end of the round we'll have a wall of examples to steal from.

Act two: recolor. After a short primer on how color works in charts (sequential, diverging, and categorical palettes, why rainbows invent edges that aren't in the data, and how a chart looks to the one in twelve men with color vision deficiency), pick a chart, yours or one from our starter set, and recolor it. Then show the before and after. Or pull a palette from a January window in Minneapolis and make it work as a real chart palette.

Pick your lane:
- No-code: ColorBrewer, Viz Palette, Datawrapper
- Code: d3-scale-chromatic, chroma.js, matplotlib and viridis, ggplot2
- Accessibility: colorblindness simulators and contrast checkers
- Analog: paint chips, colored pencils, and paper

No design experience needed; the primer starts from zero. Bring one chart whose color you have opinions about (on a phone, a laptop, or paper) and, if you want to build digitally, a laptop.