Choose the colours
Colour is the loudest thing on a report page, so it has to be spent carefully. Pick a palette below to preview it on a report page, check its contrast, and copy the hex codes or a Power BI theme file.
Three kinds of palette
The first decision is not which colours, but which kind. The kind follows from the data.
Categorical
Distinct hues for unordered groups: regions, products, carriers. Keep hues at least 30° apart on the colour wheel and stop at seven. Beyond that, group into "Other" or use small multiples.
Sequential
One hue from light to dark for ordered values: heatmaps, maps, size bands. Dark means more. Readers understand it without a legend and it works for every kind of colour vision.
Diverging
Two hues meeting at a neutral midpoint for values with a meaningful centre: variance to budget, change since last year. Use blue–orange. Red–green is invisible to one reader in twelve.
Palettes
Click a palette to preview it. Click a swatch to copy its hex code. Badges show the palette type, whether it is safe for colour-blind readers, and the lowest contrast any swatch has against a white background.
Preview and copy
Colour codes
Paste the theme JSON into a .json file and import it in Power BI Desktop via View → Themes → Browse for themes.
Rules for using colour
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60 / 30 / 10
About sixty percent of the page is neutral (white, light grey), thirty percent is your quiet base colour, and ten percent is the accent. If the accent covers more than a tenth of the page, it stops being an accent.
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Grey for context, colour for the point
Colour the one series, bar or cell the reader should look at. Everything that is there for comparison is grey. This single habit fixes most crowded charts.
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Five colours per page, at most
Count the legend entries. A palette has five to eight colours so you have a choice, not so you use them all.
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Same colour, same meaning, every page
If North is blue on page one, North is blue on page nine. If red means below target, nothing else on the report is red. Set the palette once in a theme file rather than per visual.
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Match the palette type to the data
Categories get distinct hues. Ordered values get one hue light to dark. Values around a centre get a diverging pair. A rainbow scale on a heatmap is the most common mistake on this site's mistakes page.
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Never colour alone
Pair every colour distinction with something else a reader can use: a direct label, a marker shape, a pattern, position. Colour-blind readers and greyscale printouts both need it.
Contrast and colour blindness
Contrast ratios
WCAG 2.1 asks for at least 3:1 between a chart element (bar, line, marker) and its background, and 4.5:1 for any text, including data labels. The badges above test each swatch against white; a fail means that colour needs a darker shade or a dark outline before it goes on a white card.
Adjacent colours in a stacked bar or pie also need to be told apart. Where two neighbours are close, separate them with a thin white border.
Colour vision deficiency
Around 8% of men and 0.5% of women cannot reliably separate red from green. Palettes marked colourblind safe keep every pair distinguishable under the three common types. For the others, avoid using red and green as a pair, prefer blue–orange, and add a second cue.
Test with a simulator such as Color Oracle or Coblis before publishing, or view the page in greyscale: if the story survives, the colours are doing their job rather than carrying it.
Take it with you
The colour palette reference PDF has every palette above with hex codes, for offline use.